


Hybrid Signal

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ableism, Abuse of a disabled person, Abusive Parent, Amnesia, Blood, Dubiously consensual mind wipe, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Entity politics, M/M, Mind Control, Stabbing, Tags Subject to Change as I realized I need to add things, Web!Martin, canon typical spiders, dubious Polish, eldritch abominations in love, not season 4 compliant, post-traumatic OCD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 02:06:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17757737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.Martin receives a message from an unknown individual, and discovers there's more to his role at the Magnus Institute than he previously realized.





	1. August, 2017

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by [this tumblr post](https://shortwaveattentionspan.tumblr.com/post/180172550685/the-web-sends-a-small-spider-to-the-magnus#notes). I thought this was going to be a short little thing ... I am a fool ...

_“What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root_ monstrum _, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”_ (Ocean Vuong, “A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read.”)

Martin wasn’t sure where to draw the line between paranoia and a healthy and reasonable wariness of eldritch fear gods. The days following the Unknowing had been … quiet. He should’ve been pleased at how quiet after so much stress and dread. Yes, they had lost so much, but he had time to process it, for once, instead of being abruptly hit with another emergency, a bigger priority. Things might actually be settling into a recognizable version of normal.

He’d managed to take about three days of Peter’s suggested leave before he found himself looking over his shoulder, listening in the distance for...something. He didn’t even know what. He just felt like it couldn’t be that simple, it couldn’t just end here, with Elias gone and Tim dead and Jon lost. With nothing else coming to haunt them in the darkness.

(Well, except for the Beholding, but wasn’t there some saying about the devil you knew…?)

He wanted to let it go, he did. He visited Jon in the hospital and slept in and went for drinks with some of the librarians, who kept trading outrageous theories about where Elias had disappeared to and seemed confused that Martin didn’t want to participate. He wanted to have this. He wanted to have _earned_ this.

He checked the visitor log every time he saw Jon, looking for any names that didn’t belong. He checks the locks on his front door, double- and triple-checked, and carried his keys between his fingers when he had to be out after dark. He’d been so scared for so long that he couldn’t shake the habits of it, as if compulsively touching the little flashlight in his pocket could ward off things other than the dark.

The day he was supposed to start work again, he finally noticed it. At the bus shelter near his flat, in the ticket hall of the Tube station as he tried to add money to his Oyster card, half a carriage down on the train itself. Someone was trailing behind him, a stranger in a black suit, keeping a distance but absolutely watching him.

He couldn’t have said if he was more afraid or relieved that _something was finally happening._  

Martin rode past his usual stop and got off at Victoria, hoping he could lose the stranger in the crowded station. Not that he knew how to do that on purpose, of course, but that seemed like the place to do it. After several minutes of ducking through crowds, he thought he was clear of his pursuer — at least, he couldn't see him anymore, and if Martin had lost track of him, surely he'd lost track of Martin in return…?

He exited onto the street, falling into step with the other morning commuters. A moment later, the man in the black suit appeared at his side again as if he'd never vanished. “Are you Martin Blackwood?” he asked benignly.

“Ygh,” Martin wasn’t sure how to make his mouth work for a moment, wasn’t sure if he should answer or if there was a point to lying. “Yes?”

“Adelard Dekker.” The man held out a long, slim hand; he was slim all over, actually, though not particularly tall, and what little hair hadn’t been buzzed away from his head was iron-gray. “I’m—well, I was an acquaintance of Gertrude Robinson.”

Martin shook his hand, and tried to remember whether he’d heard Dekker mentioned in any statements. “You...helped her move the pla— er. The...supplies? To her storage unit?”

Dekker smiled, a brief flash of very white teeth. “Among other things, yes. I would’ve introduced myself sooner, but I’ve been preoccupied recently, and anyway I don’t think Elias Bouchard likes me very much.”

“Well, that’s...that’s actually an endorsement, I guess,” Martin stammered. “Considering.”

“I’ll accept that in the spirit intended,” Dekker said. “I was waiting for the Archivist himself to put in an appearance, but I get the impression that’s not going to happen any time soon, is it?”

Martin wondered, for a moment, how much he should share — Gertrude had trusted Dekker, but Gertrude was also dead, and also he was increasingly unsure of whether anyone should've ever trusted _her_ , so. “I can’t say,” he finally told Dekker, figuring it was a good balance of technical truth and misdirection.

Dekker just nodded, and then reached into his jacket pocket. “You have my condolences. Collectively, I mean. And for you specifically, I have a delivery to make.”

Martin stopped in the middle of the pavement, causing at least one person to bump him rather badly from behind. Surely in a crowded public place…? “What is it?” he asked, half-demanding, half afraid of what the answer might be.

Dekker offered him a small box wrapped in newspaper, which Martin didn’t take. “Just a gift from my ex-wife. I wouldn’t usually play her errand boy, but since I was already going to be in the area...”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Martin said flatly.  

“Of course you don’t,” Dekker said. “But if you don’t take it, I’m going to have to find some other way to deliver it, and you’ve got an awful sturdy lock on your door.”

It wasn’t delivered like a threat, but then again, a skinny old man wasn’t very threatening. Then again...again, neither was Elias if you didn't know what he could do. Martin hesitantly took the box, almost amazed that it didn’t explode or turn to ash in his hand.

“I don’t expect you to thank me for it,” Dekker said quietly. “But that’s neither here nor there. Give my regards to the Archivist, whenever you’re able.”

“What are you—?” Martin blinked, but Dekker was walking away at a brisk pace. It wasn’t quite as if the crowd in the streets parted around him; more like he just knew how to be exactly where no one else was, and by utter coincidence that was also exactly where he wanted to go.

Martin tried to give chase, but he didn't have the same luck, or knack, or whatever it was. After the third person he’d accidentally shoved, he realized he’d lost sight of the other man entirely, and roaming through Belgravia during the morning rush hour wasn’t a particularly useful way of conducting a manhunt.

He studied the box instead. Small, square, bound shut with thick white twine. No writing on the outside, but then again, writing might not be easily legible against newsprint. No sellotape that might’ve held fingerprints … like Martin knew anything about fingerprints.

 _A gift from my ex-wife,_ as if Martin hadn’t literally met Dekker two minutes previously. He didn’t know anyone who could reasonably be the ex-wife of a mysterious monster hunter. Did he? There wasn’t a great abundance of older women in his life, how was he supposed to know if any of them had an ex-husband? Or maybe it wasn’t an older woman, he shouldn’t judge, people could have relationships at any age...

He realized his hands were shaking. He shoved them, and the box, into his pockets. He was supposed to be at work by … now, actually, and as much as he didn’t actually want to be there _per se_ , he also didn’t have anywhere better to go.

Down in the archives, not exactly a safe place but at least a familiar one, he picked the knots out of the twine and unwrapped the paper. Inside the box was a small dome of Perspex with felt glued along the bottom. Preserved inside was a spider: a smallish one, barely as large as a five pence, and most of that was its bulbous abdomen, mottled brown and cream.

Martin didn’t think he was imagining that the markings sort of looked like an eye.

He turned it over in his hands a few times, as if looking from another angle would reveal something. It was a paperweight, maybe? He had seen paperweights that looked like this before, though usually they were larger and the specimen inside a bit more impressive. Also, while the Perspex was heavy, he didn’t think something this small could very effectively weight papers - the whole thing was maybe three inches in diameter, tops.

Someone wanted Martin to have it, thought. Him specifically, not just the institute. And had sent Adelard Dekker to deliver it to him. You know, the fellow who once lobotomized an avatar of Death with a steel kebab skewer.

The safest thing to do with it would be to ask Artifact Storage—

Footsteps in the hall outside broke Martin’s train of thought. He quickly gathered up the packaging in one hand and the paperweight in the other, shoving one into the wastebasket and the other into his middle drawer, among the loose paperclips and the spent biros. He finished shrugging his jacket off just in time for Basira to clatter in, leading with her crutches, and his attempt to get the door for her just ended up with them in a tangle.

He let her rant about the lack of lifts in various Tube stations, and didn’t mention the paperweight or Dekker.

XXX

Martin didn’t like to think of himself as a _good liar._ He wasn’t. He didn’t, mostly.

But he didn’t think changing the subject counted as lying. Or just, you know, not saying anything at all. He knew how to keep quiet, how to hang back, how to let other people talk over him if they wanted to — and if they didn’t, well, he could always ask them a question. He’d gotten to know everyone on the same floor as his research group in the first month he’d worked at the Institute, down to the cleaners, because if they were talking he didn’t have to.

And if he asked Basira and Melanie enough questions about their two weeks’ enforced leave, maybe they wouldn’t ask him about his, and he wasn’t technically hiding anything if they never actually asked.

Right?

“We’re gone for two weeks and the fucking spiders take over,” Melanie groused, followed by a crack as loud as a gunshot.

Martin jumped, heart racing, and found Melanie examining the front of a heavy book. “What was that?”

“Spider,” she said, as if that should be obvious. A heavy book. A metal table. Maybe it should’ve been obvious.

“You shouldn’t,” Martin said, and swallowed, to avoid sounding quite so strangled. “You shouldn’t kill them.”

Melanie blinked at him. “It’s a just a spider, Martin, calm down.”

“Spiders are an important part of the ecosystem—”

 _“What_ ecosystem?”

“They control pests!”

“They _are_ pests!”

Basira eventually demanded they break it up, but the rest of the week was a silent race to see how many spiders Martin could rescue before Melanie managed to smash them. She was honestly worse about it than Jon, though Martin didn’t (yet) say that to her face.

(He didn’t think there were more spiders than usual in the archives — were there? They came up from the tunnels sometimes, but he found a silverfish in one of their webs, so he stood by his position and attempted to argue it vigorously whenever Basira wasn’t around to stop him.)

(Though he took the spider paperweight home with him, just in case.)

Since Martin didn't say anything, and nobody asked, nobody paid attention when he took the files related to Dekker from Jon's office. Not that there were many, or that they gave any hint about who had sent him to Martin — but he had to start somewhere, didn't he?

XXX

They still had to record statements; that was what the archives were for. But they agreed, among the three of them, to leave the tape recorder ones in a separate pile, and limit those to one per week. They even set up a rota.

Martin volunteered to go first, because he wanted to get it over with, and also because he’d done more than the other two and...maybe it wouldn’t be that bad? Maybe he’d gotten over the worst of it, like how you could get habituated to a bad smell or an irritating noise. Maybe it worked like alcohol, where you could build up a tolerance over time. Or maybe it was more like radiation, and if you went over your lifetime exposure limit it would kill you.

Maybe his metaphors were starting to get out of hand.

He recorded in Jon’s office, to cut down on the background noise, and so the others wouldn't notice how much time he spent procrastinating — checking and re-checking the door, the tape recorder, arranging the file and the follow-up notes just so — before he started. The statement wasn’t really a bad one: the woman who’d given it hadn’t seen much, had only conjecture and coincidence to explain why her AirBnB room made her so afraid. But it did make her afraid, made her skin crawl and her heart pound, and Martin sank into those feelings so thoroughly that for a few paragraphs he was somewhere, someone else.

And then he was done, and the silence that roared back wasn’t silence, exactly. More like the feeling of something just beyond your range of hearing: the not-whine of a muted television, or the visible twanging of a guitar string that’s gone too soft to sound.

And the Eye, of course, its weight a tangible thing that still left him breathless when it was turned his way.

“Statement ends,” Martin croaked, and he fumbled for his notes on the supplemental research.

By the time he hit stop on the tape recorder, the feeling of being watched had faded to the archive's usual low-level voyeurism. But the sense of a vibration, somewhere on the edge between hearing and touch, didn’t go away, even after he’d left for the day. It kept itching in his ears and ringing along his back teeth late into the night, and he slept through two alarms and woke up head-sore and a bit sick.

“Statement hangover, huh?” Basira asked when he shambled into work with his shirt buttoned wrong and a large coffee in one hand.

Martin hesitated on the edge of explaining, but the words got tangled up in his mouth, and the coffee was making his headache better but his stomach worse. He wasn’t even sure if he could explain, exactly, or if he even wanted to try—

(That the feeling of being one end of a plucked string was different to the feeling of the Beholding's constant watching, but also the same, but also not? That Adelard Dekker had given him a paperweight? That he checked and re-checked the lights, the locks, and squared every file to the edge of the shelf, because otherwise he'd have to think about Jon and Tim and Elias and—?)

It was easier, really, to not say anything at all.

“I’m okay,” he told Basira, and spent his lunch break napping in the old document storage (after checking and re-checking and re-checking the lock.)

XXX

There were three new spiders in his flat; he counted. George, the cupboard spider in the kitchen, was still fighting the good fight against the drain flies, but now there were webs the living room, too, and one in the bedroom above the wardrobe. Martin couldn’t seem to catch a glimpse of the spiders themselves, but he designated them John, Paul and Ringo anyway.

He wondered if they had followed him home from the archives, perhaps in gratitude — but no, that was ridiculous. It was just getting colder. Spiders always came indoors when the weather turned cold, _Melanie._ It wasn't a big deal.

Martin looked very carefully, and when he couldn’t actually find John or Paul, he cleared away their webs with a broom. Ringo got to stay, as it was too hard to see over the top of the wardrobe, and of course George was staying well-fed on drain flies, since nothing else Martin did got rid of them.

The webs were back when he woke up in the morning, so Martin chose to let them be.

XXX

Peter Lukas came down to the archive again, and as usual he seemed to coalescence out of the air and bring with him a smothering blanket of ominous silence. Martin had a split-second warning, a discordant vibration he felt/heard in the back of his skull, and then Peter was leaning against his desk looking distantly amused, as usual. “There has been,” he said dramatically, “a complaint.”

“About...the archives?” Martin hazarded, trying to lean away from the desk without actually looking like he was leaning away from it. Basira wouldn't let him lock the office door unless he was alone, though he wasn't sure if that mattered to things like Peter.

“About the spiders,” Peter said. Then he corrected: “Well, more about certain behaviors regarding the spiders than the spiders themselves.”

“She shouldn’t kill them,” Martin said before the rest of his brain had caught up to his mouth. He busied himself with re-arranging his pens while he added, “I mean. Basira could’ve just said something.”

“Ah-ah-ah, I’m not supposed to disclose who made the complaint,” Peter said, wagging one finger. “It’s in the HR handbook. I checked!”

Martin couldn’t imagine who might’ve complained besides Basira, but Peter was looking weirdly pleased with himself, and honestly he was a little afraid to press the point. “I can...try to be more discreet?" he offered. "But there’s worse things to have in the archives than spiders, and I think Melanie’s just killing them to annoy me at this point.”

“Oh, I’ll be having a word with her as well,” Peter said, and it only sounded about as ominous as anything else he said. “And maybe call an exterminator. None of the cleaning staff are willing to go into the tunnels, and I can't say I blame them, after that nasty business with the Corruption…”

(They were not. None of them would talk about it directly, of course, but Martin overheard a lot of things when he came in early or stayed late or slipped into the canteen without being noticed. They had cleaned up the worms because Elias _made_ them clean up the worms, but the ones who hadn’t immediately quit after that also didn’t clean the archives anymore.)

(Martin had asked the cleaners who did still come into the archives to be considerate of the spiders, and he suddenly wondered if one of them had complained to Peter, rather than Basira. Melanie certainly liked leaving smears of arachnid debris laying around for Martin to find….)

“I can,” Martin blurted, “I can go down there and...tidy up? A bit?”

Peter frowned at him. “No, no, that won’t do. We’re not paying you to clean, Martin.”

“It’s not a problem,” Martin insisted. If the spiders were coming up from the tunnels, well, there were a _lot_ of tunnels, and shooing them away from the entrance to the archives wouldn’t be any crueler than taking them outside. And if they weren’t coming out of the tunnels, he could tell Melanie that. And maybe gloat. Just a little.

“Well, I can’t control what you do outside business hours,” Peter said. Then he corrected, “I mean, I could, but I’m not supposed to. That’s also in the HR handbook, oddly enough. Do you think they’ve read their own handbook, or did Elias give me a special copy?”

Martin swallowed. “I...I cannot begin to answer that question.”

“Of course not. Well, I’m glad we had this little talk.” Peter clapped him on the shoulder with his ice-cold hand, and then he was gone again, leaving a different kind of silence in his wake. (Ringing, twanging, tremulous.)

Martin locked the office door, no matter what Basira said, and leaned against it until he could breathe again.

XXX

There was a different kind of silence in Jon’s hospital room — a private room, a private hospital in Harrow that looked more like a fancy hotel than a medical facility. It still smelled like a hospital, though, and Martin knew where to look for the safety rails, the hand sanitizer, the special bins for sharps. He’d half grown up in hospitals, he knew how they worked, and even found them weirdly comforting in ways he probably should've examined with a therapist by now.

Jon was still wired up to the EEG, leads fanning out from his skull like a crown, but there were no other monitors, no pulse or breathing for them to be monitoring. Martin still talked to him even though he doubted it was doing any good. Talked about the Institute, or read him statements (not the real statements, though; he respected the rota). Sometimes he read Jon poetry, though not his own: a small part of him fantasized about the healing power of literature, but mostly he did it out of some abstract hope that, if nothing else, he could _annoy_ him back to life.

And when he stopped, the silence was heavy, waiting, watched. Humming like a muted television right on the edge of Martin’s range of hearing. Sometimes he fancied that if he had the nerve to take Jon’s hand, he’d be able to feel the same hum ringing through the delicate bones, a secret sign of life in the absence of all others.

(He never took Jon’s hand, never even touched— he wasn’t that desperate. Or that brave.)

Martin still checked the visitor’s logs for suspicious names, and half-expected Adelard Dekker to be one of them. But it was still just him and occasionally Georgie Barker. Basira, once, but she didn’t bring it up and Martin didn’t know how to ask about it.

He checked the chart at the foot of Jon's bed, but there was never any change except the wild jags of the EEG. He checked the door, but of course, it didn't have a lock.

He visited anyway, and read statements or poetry so he didn't feel quite so useless.

XXX

Basira took the day off after her turn in the statement rota, though she said it was because she was getting her cast switched for a walking boot. Melanie found an excuse to trek out to Bristol for a follow-up interview the same day, so Martin was alone in the archives when Rosie ushered a wild-eyed Asian woman in. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I know you’re busy down here, but this young lady wanted to give a statement directly and there’s a bit of a problem with my equipment.”

Which was her way of saying _does not record digitally._ Martin swallowed. “Okay,” he said, “sure. Erm. Let me get the tape recorder, and she can — you can have a seat, Miss…?”

“Mahajan,” the statement-giver murmured. “Is that — does that always happen, with the speakers?”

“Our IT department’s working on it,” Rosie assured her, but she also fled the archives rather fast.

Martin dithered a bit — fresh tape in the recorder, notepad, pens, would Miss Mahajan like a glass of water? A cup of tea? — because he knew his track record for eliciting statements wasn't great. But eventually he had to make his excuses and press record. “Statement of...Amita Mahajan,” he read off the forms Rosie had brought along; she nodded. “Recorded seventh of September, 2017, regarding...an infestation?”

His stomach swooped at the word, but she nodded again. And then she began to talk.

“Like I told the other woman, I’m not arachnophobic or anything. At least I wasn’t before I moved to Stepney Green. So this wasn’t just me over-reacting, or having an hallucination from stress or something, which is what my parents think. And it’s not me making things up for attention, which is what most of my friends think. I know what I saw, and I’m not exaggerating or having a breakdown. But nobody believes me, which is why I’m here, I guess…."

She was a student, she said, studying fashion textiles at the University of East London. Some kind of falling out with her flatmates lead to her to looking for a new place to live on short notice, and she ended up with a tiny bedroom in a flatshare on Sandalwood Close. “The person in the room opposite mine was called Rowan, and they seemed cool at first, if a bit weird. I’m not sure how old they were were, or where they were actually from — actually, I don’t even know their second name. But they were excited when I talked about what I was studying, and said they were very interested in fiber arts, but they didn’t have much time to pursue it. I know I asked them about their job at some point, I must’ve done, but they never gave any details….or at least I don’t remember them.

“They did show me their art, though. It was … you know dreamcatchers? It was a bit like that, the frame and the...web, I guess, in the middle. But Rowan’s looked weird, somehow, all asymmetrical and pushed into the third dimension, sort of like a funnel? Instead of beads and feathers they would wrap up...like, jewelry, or coins, or little toys like you used to get out of a Happy Meal. I think they used bones in one, and I don’t remember if I ever asked where they got them. I...I don’t remember a lot of my conversations with Rowan now.

“That was about when I started to notice the cobwebs…”

Martin sat up a little straighter, and for some reason his heart tripped in his chest.

She described cobwebs in the corridors, cobwebs in the bath, starting in the corners but soon spreading throughout the upper floor of the flatshare. Cobwebs her flatmates either couldn’t see or ignored, cobwebs that grew back thicker every time she tore them down with a broom or a rag or her bare hands. Cobwebs that radiated out from Rowan’s room, and took on the same peculiar patterns as their art pieces, or perhaps it was the other way around.

“I wanted to confront them, but—what was I going to say?” she confessed. “So I thought I’d go into their room when they were out, just to see—something. Anything. I think I had the idea that they might’ve attracted spiders by leaving a mess. That’s what my mum always used to tell me, that if I didn’t keep my room tidy I’d attract spiders and they’d bite me in my sleep. It didn't actually scare me at the time, but now I kept thinking about it, wondering if the spiders spinning those webs were actually crawling over me while I was sleeping and I didn't know.

“I waited until Rowan was at work...I think…and then I tried their door. All the bedrooms in the flat had their own lock, but theirs was open. Well, not locked at least, the handle turned. But I still had to push to get it open, like it was stuck or jammed. When I got it open enough to stick my head through—”

Martin waited, hardly daring to breath, utterly focused on what she was going to say next, _eager_ for it in a way he usually … wasn't. But Amita let the sentence hang. For a moment he thought she was doing it on purpose for dramatic effect. Then he realized she was staring — not at at him, thankfully, but at something in the vicinity of his elbow.

A massive house spider, specifically, that had crawled onto the table top while she spoke.

Several things happened in rapid succession.

Martin opened his mouth to apologize for the spider's untimely appearance. The spider suddenly darted forward, almost faster than the eye could track, and Amita shoved her chair back from the table violently. Without thinking, following some instinct he couldn't name, Martin's hand hand shot out, and he snatched the spider off the table. Which...meant he had a spider in his hand, eight legs flailing for purchase on the air.

He cast about for something to do with it, and spotted the now-empty water glass where Amita had been sitting. It only took a moment to pop the spider into the glass, but that still didn't solve the immediate spider/hand problem, as he needed to keep one hand flat over the mouth of the glass to keep it trapped.

"Sorry," he said, a beat too late, "we've—erm—the cleaners are working on it."

"I should go," Amita blurted, and grabbed for her purse without taking her eyes off the spider.

"No, please, it's fine!" Martin tried to tilt the glass-spider-hand arrangement so that he could slide the spider onto the table without releasing it. "It's...it's not a biting kind, I can take it away if you just give me a moment—"

But her gaze flicked to him without becoming any less afraid. "Stay away from me," she said, holding out one hand as if to ward him off. "Please. Just...just let me leave."

"Okay?" He had the irrational urge to raise his hands, to show he wasn't a threat, except he couldn't do that without freeing the spider from the glass. "Fine. Erm. Is it all right if we contact—?"

But she was running for the stairs like her life depended on it.

Martin sighed, and glared at the spider, which was trying to climb the side of the glass. He took it to the farthest corner of the archives and let it crawl off his palm and onto some dusty boxes. "Don't...don't do that," he told it, and then immediately felt very, very foolish. Melanie definitely wouldn't let him live this one down, but maybe he could persuade Basira to make a follow-up call in a few days…

(He sat in his flat that night, counting the spiderwebs and toying with the paperweight, wondering about Rowan's artwork and what Amita Mahajan had found in their room, worrying over the unfinished story like a loose tooth.)

XXX

He anticipated one thing, which was that Basira and Melanie both shouted at him. He probably deserved that.

He did not anticipate Melanie disappearing for a long lunch and coming back with a large jug of something called _Miss Muffet's Revenge_. "It's spider spray," she explained. "Supposed to keep working for twelve months after you use it."

"Is that safe to use in the archives?" Martin asked, unsure why his heart was pounding.

"No idea," she answered cheerfully. "The man at the shop said they have to import it in secret from America."

Basira sighed. "Melanie, please do not douse our place of work in illegal pesticides."

"Oh, I'm not doing it," she said, and shoved the spray across Martin's desk at him. "He is."

"No," Martin said, shoving it back at her. She just shoved it towards him again. "Get that away from me."

"You're the one who's been collecting the bloody things—"

"Stop it—"

Basira snatched the jug from the table. "Can we behave like adults for five minutes?" she snapped, glaring at them. "Please?"

"Sorry," Martin muttered. Melanie didn't even say that much. "I'll come in tomorrow and clean up in the tunnels, that's … that's probably where they're coming from."

"I'll help," Melanie, though it sounded like a struggle to unclench her teeth.

"Was that really so hard?" Basira said. She set the jug down, and then reached out to grab Martin's hand; only then did he realize he'd been clicking a pen, in and out, in a steady rhythm for … how long had he been doing that, actually? "Don't make this place worse than it has to be, yeah?"

Saturday morning he and Melanie hauled the trap door up and aimed torches down into the hole. "Somehow I was expecting a real _Arachnophobia_ sort of thing," Melanie commented, when the light revealed the usual dull gray stone.

"There's not been _that_ many of them," Martin said defensively. He checked both his torches briefly, clicking them on and off a few times to make sure they both worked.

"Says you," Melanie muttered, and started down the stairs with her broom over her shoulder like a rifle. "You've only seen the ones I didn't manage to kill."

"You've only killed the ones I didn't catch first," Martin muttered, and followed her.

Martin hadn't spent that much time in the tunnels, especially compared to Jon, but he thought they perhaps looked less cramped and oppressive than usual as he flicked his light up into the corners. They had negotiated the exact terms of the de-spidering, including how much pesticide Melanie was actually allowed to use within proximity to the entrance: they started in the same place and worked their way outward, armed with brooms and bin bags and, in Melanie's case, rubber gloves that went up to her elbows. (Martin thought this was excessive but also knew what was likely to happen if he said so.)

They split up immediately, tackling opposite ends of the first tunnel. Martin focused on brushing down the webs he saw and not getting lost. Jon had said something about Leitner making the tunnels less twisted, using one of his books — well, Martin could never really tell if they were actually any better than during his first nightmarish foray down there, but they definitely still looked the same, always dull and gray with the occasional spot of damp or scuffed chalk mark.

And the cobwebs, of course. He did his best to make sure they were uninhabited before he brushed them down, but there wasn't much he could do about the little brown spiders squeezing into cracks ahead of the broom. It wasn't... _weird_...to talk to them, just a bit. "Clear out before Melanie gets here with the spray," he whispered at a particularly large and slow-moving specimen, prodding it with one finger until it vanished between two bricks. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

The spider, of course, didn't reply. Martin supposed he'd really be in trouble if that happened.

They had agreed to go a fixed distance from the archive entrance, to create a buffer that deterred new spiders from entering the building. Martin reached that distance, and then played his torch a little further on. As far as he knew, there wasn't another exit that direction, though of course the operative term there was _as far as he knew._ It also wasn't one of the areas they'd used for Elias-proof meetings, so he hadn't ever gone this way knowingly and on purpose. And he didn't have any reason to go any further now.

Except …

There was a faint sound coming from that direction, something he felt as much as heard, especially if he put his hand against the wall. The torch beam caught on something gleaming and whitish against the gray stone, just a bit further on. Given how featureless the tunnels were otherwise, it caught Martin's attention. And, well, just because they'd agreed to only clean to a certain point, didn't mean he wasn't allowed to explore _past_ that point…

Upon closer examination, the white material on the wall was cobweb, thick sheets of it. At first he thought it was just layered flat onto the wall, but upon closer examination, he realized it was hanging free over the mouth of another tunnel. This one was narrower than the others, barely wider than Martin's shoulders, with a lower ceiling besides. It was so choked with webs that he couldn't see more than a dozen feet down its length; they stretched from wall to wall, glistening in the torchlight, though there was no sign of the spiders that had made them..

Martin had always been a bit claustrophobic, and this was exactly the sort of space that usually made him feel light-headed and queasy. Not now, though; not this. Martin pushed the veil of web aside and stepped into the mouth of the tunnel, less aware of the weight of bricks and earth above him than the tautly stretched silk brushing across the front of his body. These were spiral orb webs, each one radiating out from a center point in delicate bursts (like stars, like explosions, like eyes). If he was very slow and very, very careful, he found he could squeeze through the gaps between anchor threads without breaking them — he just had to pay attention, go slowly. He wasn't the most graceful person, or the smallest, but he got past more webs than he broke that way.

The sound got stronger the further in he went, and it was definitely the by-product of a vibration, one low enough and strong enough to feel in his breastbone.  He stopped partway down the tunnel and shut his eyes, because there was something weirdly _familiar_ about it — something on the edge of his memory, something he couldn't quite place —

"Martin? Martin, are you still down here?"

Melanie's voice was more than a voice: it was a jarring buzz that didn't mesh with the vibration in the tunnel, didn't fit. Martin opened his eyes and found that at some point his torch had died. He was alone in the dark, but somehow the closeness of the tunnel felt safe instead of smothering.

"Martin, come on, this isn't funny…"

As carefully as he'd come in, Martin picked his way out of the webs and back into the main tunnel. It didn't occur to him until he started feeling around for his broom that he had a back-up torch hanging from his belt loops.

He switched it on, and heard Melanie gasp in surprise somewhere close around the corner. "Sorry," Martin blurted, and hurried to meet her. "Erm. My torch died and I…"

She was holding her broom like she was ready to brain him with it, and she didn't put it down when she said, "I've been calling for you for the last ten minutes. What were you doing back there?"

"Nothing," Martin said, which felt like a lie even though it was absolutely true.

Her eyes went narrow. "Right."

Martin added, as if that would help, "I just — I'm a little claustrophobic and it's — it gets narrow back there. And … and my torch died. So."

"Fine," Melanie said curtly, and turned away from him. "Go ahead and keep secrets."

"I'm not," Martin croaked, except he kind of was? But not anything dangerous, or important, just — he chased after her, only keeping up because his legs were longer. "I'm not lying about anything, Melanie, I swear."

"Then what were you doing in the dark down here?"

Martin opened his mouth and realized he didn't even know, couldn't put it into words. Why had he just … gone down the tunnel like that, why hadn't he torn down the webs, why …

Why wasn't he more afraid?

Melanie seemed to take his silence as an admission of guilt. "That's what I thought," she declared, and powered on ahead of him, and he let her.

By the time he scrambled back up into the archives, Melanie was on the phone, and Martin was too busy trying to calm to his own racing heart to pay attention to her. At least until she said, "Georgie, slow down—" and he realized there was only one _Georgie_ she was likely to be talking to. "Okay. … Well, he's right here, I can tell him. Do you have Basira's number? … Okay."

As soon as she lowered her phone from her ear, Martin asked, "It's Jon, isn't it?"

She nodded. "Apparently, he just woke up."


	2. September, 2017

Jon looked normal — good, actually, amazing, considering he'd been dead for a month. He was up and about faster than Martin expected, and if his voice was a bit hoarse or his movements a bit slow or hair still stuck up in weird cowlicks from EEG … well, he had been  _ dead.  _ Compared to that, anything else was a miracle. 

But his eyes had gone distant, even when he was looking right at you, and he touched things around him like he wasn't sure if he was dreaming them. And there was—something, an air about him (a vibration) that Martin both knew and didn't, that was new and agonizingly familiar at the same time. 

He'd known, or at least been told, that the Archivist was connected to the Beholding. But he'd never before been so aware that when he was looking at Jon, something else was also looking back.

"How'd you do it?" Melanie asked when Jon presented himself back at the institute on Monday morning. "A building literally fell on you. Tim was in so many pieces, it had to be a closed-casket funeral."

"I didn't do anything," Jon said, with light emphasis on the  _ I.  _ "Something else … the institute's not finished with me yet, it would seem."

"So it just … brought you back?" Basira asked, with one eyebrow raised. "A month late."

Jon made a face. "Not exactly. But I was … I had help, getting out. It's complicated."

"Out of the House of Wax, you mean?" But Jon excused himself and hid in his office the rest of the day, and while the rest of them shared the same uneasy look, none of them quite had the nerve (or the heart) to press him for more answers right away.

Martin waited for him to say something about missing files on Adelard Dekker, as if Jon would know on sight that his office had been disturbed. He waited for Jon to say something about spiders, though there definitely weren't any in the office (Martin had checked). He waited for Jon to say that he'd heard Martin reading to him, or to ask about Elias, or… anything. 

The door to the office stayed closed, though. He didn't even leave for lunch.

Martin cleaned and re-organized the entire kitchenette, and then fixed a cup of strong black tea. When that went cold on the counter, he threw it out, washed the mug and fixed another one. On the third try he worked up the nerve to carry it to Jon's office, but he hesitated at the door, not sure what he was going to say, not sure what he wanted to say. Maybe there were voices on the other side of the door, maybe Jon was on the phone, maybe he should—

"Come in, Martin," Jon called, and there was nothing to do but turn the handle and obey.

Jon was reading through statements, the tape recorder pile, but he looked up and gave an small, awkward little smile. He still looked rather sickly, but it was a far cry from the sunken pallor of death, so Martin was hardly going to complain. "Thank you." 

"It's nothing," Martin mumbled, depositing the mug on the corner of the desk.  _ It's good to have you back,  _ he wanted to say,  _ I'm glad you're okay,  _ or  _ I'm sorry  _ (it didn't matter about what, there was usually something). 

He couldn't get the words out, though, at least not before Jon's smile slipped. His brows knit, just a little. "Martin, you look—" 

"Fine," Martin blurted out, because he couldn't think of a way for Jon to finish that statement that wouldn't hurt. Because — because Jon had to  _ know,  _ right? If anyone could see, it would be him. "I'm — it's fine."

"All right," Jon said softly, and let Martin flee.

XXX

There was another new spider in his flat. Martin couldn't see it, any more than he could see the ones that weren't George, but the web was in his bedroom, right above the bed. Boris, he named it, even though it wasn't strictly on-theme. He could practically hear John Entwhistle's falsetto:  _ creepy, crawly, creepy, crawly… _

There were webs under the Archives, a long narrow tunnel of them, and Martin didn't know what was at the end of it. He didn't know why he wasn't afraid of it, he couldn't explain why he'd calmly climbed down it, why he felt so safe and cozy in the dark. It reminded him of something that was just out of reach, like having a word on the tip of his tongue — except when he forgot a word, there was a whole sentence waiting to receive it, a gap he could try to work backwards from. This he didn't know, and he didn't know  _ why  _ he didn't know, what he was missing. This was…

(... _ creepy creepy crawly crawly creepy creepy crawly crawly…) _

He turned the spider paperweight over in his hands, over and over, held it up so the spider was superimposed on Boris's web.  _ A gift from my ex-wife,  _ Dekker had said, though Martin didn't know Dekker and definitely didn't know his wife. Didn't have any idea where he might've even met them, how he could've forgotten them. But clearly he'd forgotten something.  _ I don't expect you to thank me for it.  _

Martin wasn't a very clever man, but he usually got there in the end.

XXX

Jon ghosted around the institute, when he wasn't holed up in his office, and Martin tried to avoid him without being obvious about doing so. He wasn't sure Jon would help, not with this, or if he even could. And anyway (he thought, a bit hysterically, when he thought about it at all) he shouldn't go to Jon without first doing his due diligence, it would look bad on his review.

Martin took on the filing so he could surreptitiously pull statements — Carlos Vittery, Alexia Crawley, Annabelle Cane, Hill Top Road. He smuggled them home and read them at night, read Jon's follow-up notes and took notes of his own. Not on tape; he knew better than that. He scribbled in the same composition books he used for his poetry, copied out passages by hand so he could circle and highlight without marking up the statements themselves. He went looking for other spider statements in the backlog, too, though he couldn't be completely sure about some of them because no one had ever tried recording them yet. 

Other statements … he just  _ knew _ . He could feel it, like the paper was rustling under his fingers despite being flat on the desk. He felt even worse about taking those out of the archives, but — but he needed to understand. He'd put them back later. He promised the archive so, under his breath when no one else was watching him, and felt like an idiot for doing it.

(He listened, when no one else was watching him: in the canteen, at the circulation desk, between the shelves of the archive itself. No one outside the four of them and Peter knew where Jon had been, but everyone could tell there was something different about him, even if they chalked it up to the wrong things — had he been ill, had he taken a holiday, was he sent to jail like Elias? Basira and Melanie had always got a weird vibe off Jon, of course, but now it was worse. Now they were whispering about Martin, too, about his jumpiness and his evasiveness and the way he checked the locks, one two three, every time he passed a door, just in case. They whispered when they couldn't see him and talked too loudly when they could.)

(Jon wasn't talking to anyone, at least where Martin could overhear; but sometimes he heard soft voices coming from the closed office. Or maybe not voices, maybe something more or less than voices, but he couldn't interpret them any other way.)

The statement rota, which they had written up on a sheet of A4, stayed on the wall. "Peter has advised me," Jon announced with a banked anger that was the most emotion he'd showed since coming back, "that it would be best if you three continued to record statements. Something about building good habits."

"And feeding evil gods?" Melanie asked. "Here I was thinking I'd dodged that bullet when you got back."

Martin cleared his throat, thinking quickly. "I could, er, go again, if you — if you're not up to it?"

They all stared at him, Melanie and Basira and Jon and … more-than-Jon. It was a stupid thing to have said, because when had any of them besides Jon volunteered to record if they didn't have to? But it would give him an excuse to call off the day after, to spend a whole day at home diving into his stolen statements without any eyes (or Eye) upon him.

"When did you turn into a glutton for punishment?" Melanie challenged, looking at him with nothing but suspicion. 

"I'm not, but … I've done more of them," Martin tried. "And I think I'm, getting the hang of it, I guess? So if you wanted to put off your turn I wouldn't mind." 

For a moment he thought it might actually work: she hesitated, and Martin could feel that slight pause stretched out between them, thrumming and taut. It wasn't like she actually wanted to record, and this was just giving her a chance to avoid it, do something she wanted to do anyway…

Then the tension snapped, and the sound of her chair scraping against the floorboards rattled Martin's teeth. "I don't need protection," she growled, glaring.

"I wasn't — wasn't trying to imply—"

"Well, you  _ did _ ."

"Sorry. I'm—" he averted his eyes from her, from all of them, from the feeling like he'd just done something wrong. "I'm sorry."

"The rota is a good idea anyway," Jon said, before Melanie could really work up a head of steam. "You shouldn't … over-expose yourselves, regardless of what Peter or Elias thinks. It's not safe."

"Nothing about this place is safe," Basira pointed out. 

"But you should have some choice—" Jon shook his head slightly. "Anyway. Until I can persuade Peter otherwise, you should stick to the rota and let me know if it's becoming a problem."

Later, Martin filed: he went between shelves, sorting and stacking, arranging each folder and box so it was square and tidy and a thumb's width from the edge. It kept him from obsessing over the spiders or the Eye or the amorphous guilt that trying to take Melanie's spot in the rota was some sort of  _ transgression _ . He kept stepping across the trap door, but he couldn't get the key without going by Jon's office, and the urge to go down — or at least to check that it was still locked, just in case, just to be sure — couldn't quite trump the need to avoid Jon's attention. For now, at least. Only until he had an explanation.

He listened for Melanie banging out the door at ten minutes till, for Basira leaving at five exactly. He finished aligning the last binder in the row, and then turned to go, only to find Jon standing at the end of the shelf, arms folded, watching him. Of course he was. The Eye was always watching, down here, and the weight of Jon's stare was indistinguishable from the familiar pressure of the archives themselves.  


"Hi," Martin blurted stupidly, feeling frozen in place. 

"You've been avoiding me," Jon said, flat and quiet. 

Martin cringed, but there wasn't any evading that sort of directness, no talking around it. "....sort of?"

Jon bit his lip, and for all he was more than human now, he certainly looked like the same pale, exhausted man Martin had worked with for the past two years. "Are you," he asked, paused and then restarted. "I'm concerned that you're…that I scare you."

That was simultaneously better and worse than what Martin had expected. He took a deep breath, and then another, thinking about what to say to that. He might've tried the truth, if he knew what that was. "I'm just...working on something," he mumbled, unable to make (hah) eye contact. "And it's...I don't...it's complicated?"

(He didn't say,  _ and I'm afraid you'll hate me if you know.) _

Jon nodded stiffly. "All right." 

"All...right?" Martin echoed. 

He'd been expecting more argument, more pushback, more probing — but Jon just looked tired. "I trust you," he said, like he was persuading himself more than reassuring Martin.

The weight of that statement left Martin a little breathless. So did the knowledge that he might not deserve it. "I should go," he mumbled, and Jon stepped aside so Martin could get past him. 

He left Jon in the archives, thin and pale and clutching himself like he was wounded. When Martin was back in his flat, he spent half the night pacing under the spiderwebs and the other half checking his locks, as if any amount of ritual would dispel the knots in his stomach.

XXX

Martin dreamed about webs, when he did sleep, glistening threads unspooling around him, taut and trembling. Each strand connected to a person: Jon, Melanie, Basira, Elias. His mum, his neighbors, Hannah from the library, strangers from the Tube. Some were thick and braided, some were tenuous, fragile, frayed. They were tied to him, to one another, to figures in the distance that he couldn't make out, an intricate net that billowed out in every direction.

He could tug one of those threads, draw it in or play out slack, and everything shifted around him. A constellation of people and relationships, and if he could only see it from a high enough angle he could figure out where to pull, who to push, to make it fit a pattern. To weave it into whatever he wanted. But he was in the thick of it, surrounded by people, yanked about even as he tried to pull and shift and control, and he needed to get above it, he needed to  _ see— _

The threads shifted, jerked, sent him crashing into Jon. Jon, whose face was covered like a blindfold, web sticking in his hair like electrodes, like a crown. Martin steadied them both and followed the webs, thick and shining and rising high up above them both. 

He looked up into the Eye, which looked down into him, an infinite orb web reflected in its pupil.

He woke up shaking. 

XXX

That he held it together for another entire week was as much a surprise to Martin as anyone else. He wasn't sleeping much; even when he tried to grab naps in the storage room he spent more time checking the lock on the door than actually laying down. There were fewer spiders in the archives, but even more in his flat, so many that he was losing track of the names he gave them. He actually went to an exotic pet store to find out the price of feeder crickets, because there couldn't possibly be enough drain flies in his kitchen to go around. 

The idea of unleashing a bag of crickets in his flat to feed a growing colony of potentially eldritch spiders … seemed a lot more reasonable than it should've done. He didn't, but he didn't completely rule it out as an option, either. 

Maybe it was the lack of sleep that made him start to see the webs in the waking world as well. Sometimes clots of silk at the corners of his vision, sometimes ephemeral threads that twined and twisted around people as they went about their business. He wasn't sure if the webs were fading in and out of existence, or if they were always there and his ability to perceive them was coming in and out of focus. Either way it made holding a conversation …difficult. 

"Earth to Martin," Basira said, waving a hand in front of his face that made the webs around her judder and tremble. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Sorry," Martin mumbled. "Erm. You were asking about bookshop….?"

Her eyes went narrow and tight. "Try again."

Martin flinched. "Sorry," he said again, like that would help, and tried to ignore the broken, bloody threads that trailed from her chest. 

She didn't press him, though. Neither did Melanie, though that was because she barely spoke to him. They just whispered behind his back, when they thought he couldn't hear, and they weren't the only ones. The whole institute knew the archives were weird, and some of them couldn't stop watching its latest casualty in progress.

Jon still gave him tasks to do, though, and if he whispered he did it behind closed doors.  _ I trust you,  _ he'd said, and he seemed determined to mean it. 

Peter, of course, didn't even bother to whisper.

He caught Martin in the canteen, on a day when he remembered to actually eat. The room went from nearly empty to totally empty in a burst of grinding static, except for Peter sat across from him with his chair turned back-to-front and a dead-eyed shark's smile on his lips. "You're looking poorly, Martin."

"Could you … not do that?" Martin asked, rubbing his temples. There were webs all around the room, but none of them touched Peter, didn't even come near him. 

"Do what?" Peter asked blandly. Martin shook his head. "As I was saying, there have been some concerns about your recent behavior. I even had the Archivist in my office, shouting at me. Has he ever shouted at you?"

Martin tried to busy himself with his sandwich. "A lot, actually. Aren't you supposed to keep complaints confidential?"

"Oh, I'm sure he doesn't mind." Peter leaned in, studying Martin closely with pale eyes. "And I can certainly see what's troubling him. Have you been reading something that you shouldn't have?"

Something about that avuncular tone, combined with the icy silence that followed Peter like a shadow, rubbed him just the wrong way. Martin pushed his tray away, wishing he could push Peter away just as easily. "I'm working on something," he said, aware of how snotty he sounded but not actually caring. "Not that it's actually any concern of  _ yours." _

Peter's eyes went wide for a fraction of a second, and Martin's words echoed weirdly in the empty canteen. He had a brief, wild image of Peter actually walking away, back to his office, back to his ship, right out to sea— 

But in the next instant Peter was laughing, actually slapping his knee, which was something Martin didn't think anyone did outside of cartoons. "Oh, this is brilliant," he wheezed. "Elias will simply be beside himself! You know how he  _ hates  _ surprises."

"What are you talking about?" Martin asked, suddenly, desperately certain that Peter knew exactly what was going on, when he himself was still only feeling out the edges of it.

But Peter just shook his head. "No. Nope. I shan't spoil it for you. But I will let Jon know he has nothing to be concerned about." His smile twisted. "Well, maybe one thing."

"Peter—" Martin jumped to his feet, though he wasn't sure how that was supposed to help. But in the split second it took him to stand, Peter had gone, and the noise of the canteen rushing back was almost deafening. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his hands to his ears, though the hum of activity was somehow  _ felt  _ as much as  _ heard;  _ when he opened his eyes again, the few people still in the room were staring at him, at least until he met their eyes.

Staring he could handle, at least. At this point he wasn't sure what he'd do if he  _ wasn't  _ being constantly watched. 

By the end of the week he felt like he was sleepwalking, if sleep involved occasional bursts of heart-stopping panic at unexpected noises or sudden movements. He wasn't sure if the weekend would be better or worse: he could stay in his flat, with doors and windows he knew were locked, with all the spiders spinning in the corners and cupboards while he tried to find a solution in the files he'd gathered. He'd be far away from the tunnels and the pull of that web-choked corridor. He'd be  _ alone. _

Either way, he had to make it to five o'clock first. 

He was almost there when he knocked on Jon's door to deliver some records that had been faxed over. He could hear voices from the other side, actual soft voices rather than a buzz that suggested them, but with his brain fogged with webs and sleeplessness it didn't actually register until he'd already opened the door. "Jon, I've got the police reports for the—"

He froze, as much because of what he saw as the grating, screaming whine that filled the room without making a sound. Jon was sat at his desk, looking positively sulky, and a woman was standing in front of him. She was sort of blandly pretty without looking distinctive, and her hair was escaping in wisps from where it was gathered at the base of her neck. Behind her was a door.  


Martin recognized this woman, but the last time he'd seen her she hadn't had quite so many bones in her hands. 

"Just leave it, Martin," Jon said, sounding tired. He seemed remarkably unbothered by the monster in his office, perhaps because he was so close to becoming one himself, now. 

The woman, however, was looking at Martin with a passive sort of curiosity. "I know you," she said, never blinking. "You wanted to save Helen."

"What are you?" Martin asked. He couldn't keep the tremor out of his voice, remembering Michael's endless corridors and the days he and Tim had once spent running through them. This woman had been there, but not like this, not giving off a vibration that made his hair stand on end and his teeth ache. Or maybe she had been and he just hadn't been able to feel it at the time. 

She tilted her head in a way people didn't. "I could ask you the same question."

"This is the Distortion," Jon said; he moved, making the webs in Martin's peripheral vision flutter, but Martin couldn't take his eyes off the woman to see what he doing. "The one that used to be Michael. And also used to be Helen Richardson. That part's ... complicated."

Martin swallowed around the dryness in his mouth. "What's it doing here?"

"I...owe it a favor." Jon sounded worried. "Martin, you don't look well."

Helen chuckled, and it still managed to spiral around them and make the webs in the room twist and warp unpleasantly. There was a single sturdy thread tying Jon to her great clawed hands. "It's my fault, Archivist. The weaving ones have certain ideas about order and symmetry; I confuse them. Spirals they can do, but fractals, not so much."

"What are you talking about?"

It was the first time Martin had heard Jon ask a straightforward question since he returned from the dead. It rang out like a bell, crisp and clear, cutting briefly through the chaos jangling around Helen and wrenching an answer out of her more forcefully than any strand of spiderweb. "Your assistant is not what he seems to be," she said. "He was one thing when Michael caught him, and now he's another. It's all right," she added in an soothing tone that was completely at odds with the hand she stretched out towards him. "We're changing, too."

Martin recoiled from the hand, the words, and was finally able to tear his eyes away to glance at Jon. Jon, who was staring at him now, brow slightly furrowed. Jon, and all the power he embodied, who was going to drag a confession out of Martin before he even knew what he was confessing to and— and— 

"I'm sorry," Martin blurted, and then he ran.

XXX

He didn't stop running until he was all the way across Vauxhall Bridge, and only then because he was too out of breath to keep going. The panic remained, however, and so did the webs that slid in and out of focus as he staggered toward a bus shelter. Home, he needed to get back to his flat — behind doors that he could count and lock. If nothing else, the sheer number of spiders in the place would keep Jon away. And the files were there, and something in them had to make sense somehow—

He hadn't thought to grab his jacket in his headlong rush, though, and a two-second check of his pockets confirmed that his wallet had been in it. No wallet meant no Oyster card, no debit card, and thus no ride. Walking home from Vauxhall took over an hour, counting all the times he had to stop and put his back to a wall and  _ breathe.  _ And then, of course, when he finally made it to his building, he realized his keys had also been in his jacket pocket, leaving him locked out and exposed on the street. 

Martin spent a few frantic minutes trying and failing to get one of his neighbors to buzz him inside, before the strain and sleeplessness got to be too much. He kicked the door as hard as he could, which left a perfectly-formed footprint on the steel but otherwise had no effect. "Somebody let me  _ in!"  _ he shouted, and then he swore, and then he kicked again. This time he connected with his toe, though, and the lance of pain that went through his whole foot sent him tumbling to the concrete steps.

For a little while, Martin sat where he had fallen, and sobbed into his hands.

It wasn't the cathartic cry he'd hoped for. Even in the middle of it, he knew he couldn't stay there, out in the open. And he couldn't go back to the institute for his things, not without seeing Jon, not without being seen by him. Not without facing a question to which he didn't have an answer. 

He eventually retreated to a cafe a few streets over, nursing a cup of weak tea and tracing nervous patterns onto the sticky table. Maybe he could sneak into the Institute like Tim used to, through the tunnels, after Jon left for the day — but Jon hardly left work when he was all the way human, and anyway, he wasn't sure where there was another street entrance to the tunnels. He wasn't sure, if he went down there, he wouldn't end up in the webs again.

Maybe he could call Basira—? No, he'd left his phone behind as well, and even if he had it, she probably wouldn't take his calls. Melanie definitely wouldn't. Odds were they both thought he was either delusional or conspiring against them, and … and he wasn't sure they weren't right. 

Night fell while he stewed on it. The waitress at the cafe came around a few times to check on him, but even if he'd had enough cash in his pockets he felt too sick to eat anything. Outside the webs slid in and out of focus, glistening and glimmering in the shifting light of cars and billboards. Martin buried his head in his hands, exhausted beyond measure. 

And then felt the familiar vibration, like the whine of a muted television, and flinched.

Jon came up to Martin's table but didn't sit. He just placed Martin's jacket and phone down, and then stuffed his hands in his own pockets awkwardly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know the nature of your last encounter with the Distortion. I'll try to keep it out of the archives from now on." A beat. "Helen also says it's sorry, which is something of a new development for it. For whatever that's worth."

Martin dared to glance up, but Jon was looking at his own shoes. "Thank you?"

He seemed to take that as permission to sit. "I owe Helen because it helped me find my way back from...back to life. Out of the coma, I mean. Which is twice now it's saved me." He explained this with an uncharacteristic hesitancy. "We've been discussing what it means to be human. What it means to be … other than human."

The mug of tea was cold and solid in Martin's grip, even when the skin of his knuckles turned white. "What did it say about me?"

Jon shut his eyes, looking strained. "I trust you, Martin," he said again, just as fervently as the first time. "Obviously something is wrong, I don't need cryptic hints from Helen or Peter to  _ see  _ that. But if you're unwilling to tell me about it, I … I will be fine with that." 

He would not be fine with that. Martin knew that, not because he knew anything about the Beholding but because he knew Jon, the man who'd accused him of murder over a single incomplete sentence. But now he was trying to be fine with it, trying not to ask questions, trying to trust and be trustworthy, and … and Martin was very tired. 

"I'm not afraid of you," he blurted, which caused Jon's eyes to fly open wide. "Not you-as-you, anyway. But I'm sort of afraid of … of me. Because I did something that I don't remember, and I'm changing, and if I'm some sort of … Winter Soldier sleeper agent thing, I … I'm scared of what I might do."

Jon nodded slowly. "Which would be why you haven't asked anyone else for help."

"Mostly, yeah." Martin swallowed. "I think I do need help, though."

For a moment they were both silent in the quiet cafe. Then Jon said, very quietly, "I want to help, but… " A pause, and then his mouth twisted. "Jonathan wants to help you. The Archivist merely wants  _ know _ . And if both of those aren't possible, I am not sure I'm strong enough to choose the nobler option."

Martin considered this confession, and everything it entailed about what Jon was now. And everything Jon was really asking. "I don't… I want to know, too," he said carefully. "I want to  _ understand  _ this. Because I don't think I can stop it, and anyway … I mean, it's not like I'm any safer if I'm human. Tim and Sasha weren't—" He stopped, because Jon flinched. "I just want it to be a choice. My choice. If that still matters."

Jon sighed, and Martin couldn't tell if it was more relieved or mournful. "All right," he said, and folded his hands on the table the same way he did when he was taking a statement. "Tell me what you know."

Letting it all spill out felt good. Telling Jon things usually did, and Martin was beyond caring about why that was. The waitress seemed to know that it wasn't a good idea to interrupt them, though the cold mug of tea was replaced by a hot one with silent efficiency. "Almost everything in the statements I read is about … controlling people, or trapping them," he confessed, "and I don't — I don't want that? That doesn't feel like me? But I don't even know what  _ me  _ means, I think, if I'm … if I've forgotten something like this. Maybe I used to be a completely different person, and everything I think is Martin Blackwood is just something the Web put in my head to trick Elias into hiring me…"

Jon drank it all in without taking notes, hardly even moving, until he suddenly reached out to still Martin's nervously tapping fingers. The point of contact felt jarring and comforting at once, even though he knew it was only because he was being annoying. "The paperweight and the files you took are still at your flat," Jon said, clearly intending it as a question even if he wouldn't risk phrasing it as one.

Martin nodded. "I'd invite you up, but — spiders."

"It's fine." Jon leaned back away from the table, releasing Martin's hand, and glanced at his watch. "I can do some digging on my own for now, and in the morning you can bring everything back to the archive so we can put our heads together."

"You don't think I'm dangerous?" Martin asked warily.

"Dangerous relative to what?" Jon shot back. "Helen? Elias? Me?"

Martin sighed. "Yeah, okay."

Jon stood up. "Get some rest, Martin," he said, and awkwardly squeezed Martin's shoulder before he left the cafe. Maybe he was trying to comfort him. Maybe he was just testing to see if Martin was a human-shaped bag of spiders. He tried not to read too much into it either way. 

XXX

Martin did rest, surprisingly, and only had to get up once during the night to check the locks. It was only technically still morning when he arrived back at the institute, but Jon was still wearing yesterday's clothes, and the skin around his eyes looked bruised and puffy. Martin had an irrational urge to hold the statements hostage until Jon had at least showered and gotten something to eat, and he didn't think that was a spider thing, because it was for Jon's own good. In that much, he was still human.

Jon didn't acknowledge him until he set the stack of folders down on the corner of the desk, the same corner where he usually set a cup of tea. "Oh. It's … I wasn't watching the time," he murmured, giving a familiar owlish blink.  _ He  _ was still human enough for that.

Martin bit down a jibe about taking better care of himself, and pushed the folders and the paperweight towards Jon. "This is everything."

In return, Jon offered Martin a few slim files and a couple of cassettes. "Obviously I didn't have anything additional on the Web specifically, but these … these are all the statements we have, I think, given directly by avatars of one of the Powers. It might be … instructional."

Martin took the pile, and tried not to notice that one of the cassettes had Jon's name on it and a date from last week.

Neither of the tape recorders had a headphone jack, but Jon didn't seem to mind Martin playing the tapes back aloud, even when they involved his own screaming. (Though that did finally explain what had happened to the hand, all those months ago.) The only one he couldn't bring himself to play was the one from Jane Prentiss; he didn't think he could bear hearing her words in Jon's voice. Instead he began to read her statement silently, puzzling through the unsteady jags of her handwriting. 

Before he was through it, he had to stop, and lock the door. 

"Martin?" Jon put the files down and watched him check the lock, re-check, re-check. "You've found something."

"Prentiss," he said, when he'd caught his breath enough. A bitter laugh died somewhere in his throat. "Figures that she'd be the one to get it close, doesn't it?"

"How—?" Jon's teeth actually clicked as he shut his mouth sharply. "Explain that, please."

It was easier to think about with his back to the door, with the illusion of safety it provided. "She said it was like a song, didn't she? Except that's not it, not exactly. It's just the rhythm, not the sounds. The vibration. Sort of like … hearing and feeling at the same time without being either one. Does that make sense?"

"Not...particularly," Jon said after a moment. "Though I think I'd struggle to put some of my own experiences of the Beholding into words." He hesitated. "If I recall that one correctly, she also spoke about … homes."

"I'm not full of spiders," Martin said automatically. "I think one of us would've noticed that before now."

"Of course," he said quickly. Then he picked up the spider paperweight and began to turn it over in his hands. "I hope you'll forgive the intrusion, but I spent last checking up on you."

Martin blinked at that. "Like...like a background check?"

"Something like that." Jon wasn't looking at Martin, but the hum of the Beholding under his skin was unmistakable. "I tried to find Adelard Dekker without much luck, much less his alleged wife, so I changed tactics and had a look at your CV. It's almost all completely unverifiable, by the way. So … good job with that."

"Thanks?"

"There is one thing I'd like to ask you about, though," Jon continued, and here he did glance up. "If you're amenable."

Martin assumed that translated as  _ if you don't mind being compelled.  _ It wasn't like he hadn't already spilled his guts to Jon, though, plenty of times. "What is it?"

"Where did you work before you joined the Magnus Institute?"

It was an odd sensation; Martin could  _ feel  _ the question pulling at him, but only distantly, like it was bumping up against a layer of cotton wool. Or spiderweb. "I was in school," Martin said warily, knowing somehow this wasn't quite right. "I dropped out when I was—"

"—Seventeen, right," Jon said. "That would've been, what, 2004? 2005?"

"The end of 2004," Martin confirmed. "I, er, I had a scholarship that I thought would pay for my A-levels, but … well, it didn't pay for anything else. So."

Jon nodded. "And when were you hired on here?"

"July of 2007," Martin said automatically. 

Then he blinked, when he realized what he'd just said.

There was the gap, finally, the missing word, the thing that was sitting on the tip of his tongue. It made him feel light-headed and weak. "Mum couldn't keep working, so I dropped out of school to look for something while she applied for benefits," he said, as if talking it through would make two and a half years suddenly reappear in his head. "Except no one was hiring, and … and then she wanted a care home, the one in Devon, which was more than the NHS would pay for and more than we could afford, so I applied here..." 

Jon stood up and stepped closer to Martin without breaking eye contact. "And what did you do in the meantime? From 2005 to 2007?"

"I — I don't —"

"Martin, who did you work for?"

Maybe it was the change in phrasing that finally did it; the answer finally came, ripped free from whatever had been protecting it, leaving him breathless. "Dolores Crenshaw," he said, though the name held no meaning for him. "I worked for Dolores Crenshaw and the Greater Manchester Human Development Foundation." 

Jon was standing so close now, and his face was merciless. Something in his eyes seems to shine, like a cat's in the dark. "Who is Dolores Crenshaw?" the Archivist asked.

Martin didn't know, yet the question snagged him like a fishhook. The name caught in his throat, and a sharp pressure flared behind his eyes. Somewhere in the office, a tape recorder clicked on, and Martin began to talk. 


	3. March, 2005

Martin went to the jobcentre in Salford every week, like he was supposed to, and tried every time to believe that this week there would be something, some perfect job that only needed the qualifications he already had, and paid enough to get by on, and was willing to start him right away. 

Every week he was wrong. 

“Are you sure you don't want to apply for a restaurant job?” the woman across the desk asked, like she did almost every week after looking through Martin's booklet of applications. "We've got some listings for those."

“I’m my mum’s only carer,” Martin replied, just like he did every time the question was asked. “She's got a schedule, I can't — I need regular hours, and not in the evenings.”

“Have you applied for income support from the council?”

Of course he had, it was the first thing they’d tried — but the man from the council said their house was worth too much, that it gave them too much assessed capital or something. The lady from the NHS said much the same thing, and added that Martin couldn’t apply for carer’s benefits anyway until he turned eighteen in June. He’d asked her who was supposed to take care of his mum until then and she hadn’t had an answer. 

(“Leave it to the nurses, Martin,” his mum snapped more than once. “I’m dying anyway. Just send me to a home and let me die.” But the homes cost money, too, and the damned house still counted against them even though it was the only thing she owned, the only home Martin had ever known—)

He walked all the way home from the jobcentre, because he couldn’t spare the bus fare. He kicked at trash in the streets and tried not to let frustrated tears spill out of his eyes. Maybe next week would be different. Maybe he’d find something part-time, something to hold them over until his birthday. Maybe one of the stupid skills courses they kept offering him would turn into something. Maybe—

“Young man. Come here.”

The words knifed through all his anguish and carved it cleanly away. He looked up from his toes poking through the holes in his trainers to see a woman across the street — an elegantly dressed Black lady with a halo of white hair, sat in a motorized wheelchair. She had several bags of shopping balanced precariously in her lap, and for some reason the only thought left in Martin’s mind was to do as he was asked, crossing as soon as the light had changed. 

The moment he was in front of her, she thrust some of the bags at him. “Help me with these.” It wasn’t really an order, though, or at least she didn’t say it like it was an order. She spoke like she was just stating something that was already going to happen. Of course Martin was going to come when she called. Of course he was going to hoist her bags onto his own shoulder, and trail behind her as she rolled away up the road. 

And of course he  _ did,  _ though afterwards he couldn’t possibly have explained why. Something about her demeanor, maybe, or that tone of voice. But as soon as she spoke it was the only thought in his head. He couldn’t even say he wanted to follow her, because that implied some kind of universe where he might not have done so. You might as well have asked him if he wanted to  _ breathe _ . 

She lead him to an old two-story house in an unfamiliar neighborhood off Langworthy Road, with a fancy brick exterior and an overgrown front garden. There were steps up to the front door, but she led him around the side, where a long ramp had been built up to the back entrance. He’d tried building a ramp like that for his mum, once, but the cheap lumber scraps he’d used had split around the screws, and it had wobbled so badly she refused to even try it. He went back to lifting her, hoisting her in his arms while she clutched his shoulders and cursed in Polish until he could set her down in the chair.

(His mum didn't get out very much anymore.)

Inside the house was dim and stuffy, overly warm compared to the damp spring weather outside. The moment they were in the kitchen, Martin’s brain kicked into gear again with a jolt. What on earth was he _doing?_ He’d never met this woman in his life and here he was, in her home, carrying her … groceries? He looked at the bags in his hands. Groceries and small electronics, apparently. And a plastic tub labeled  _ Crickets,  _ with a very life-like illustration on the side. When he prodded it through the bag, he could feel movement inside.

“Leave those on the table in the kitchen,” she said (announced, declaimed) and rolled through a doorway towards the front of the house. Martin was aware enough, now, to realize the urge to obey her was...it wasn’t a thought, it wasn’t how thinking and doing and choosing worked at all. It was more like an automatic door or a wind-up car, like ticking clockwork — like following a track someone else had laid down. He set the bags down, and thought about just running, getting out before she could say (do) anything else to him…

He could hear her struggling with her coat in the front room, though, just like his mum struggled on the days she bothered to change out of her nightgown. Martin thought about leaving, could have chosen to leave. Should've left, to be honest, while he'd still only been made to do a little light lifting and not...something worse. 

Instead, despite his heart pounding, he followed her deeper into the house.

The front room wasn’t all that much brighter, though more light did filter around the edges of the curtains. The woman had rolled up to an elaborate old desk and was writing something now; there were a few faded-looking stuffed chairs in the middle of the room, and shelves made of dark wood lined the walls. Some of these held books, but others held what looked like fish tanks at first glance. It was only when Martin looked closer at one that he realized there was no water in it: it was a terrarium, and inside was a fuzzy spider the size of his hand and the color of a summer sky. 

There were, he thought, an awful lot of these terrariums in the room.

“Do you like my pets?” Martin jumped and looked up; the woman was facing him now, and that was the first normal-sounding thing she’d said to him so far. She didn’t look annoyed that he’d followed her; if anything, she looked...interested? Was that the word for the look in her eye?

“They’re...nice?” Martin answered, when he realized that he did in fact have a choice about answering. “I...I didn’t know they came in colors.” 

She hummed a bit in response. Her eyes were very dark and oddly piercing, and Martin found them hard to look at directly. He tried to study the brilliant blue spider instead. Once he got past the shock of it being there at all, there was nothing actually scary about it, unlike her. 

“Come back tomorrow morning, nine o’clock,” she said suddenly, in  _ that  _ tone. Martin didn’t feel urged to do anything in particular at that very instant, but somehow he knew in his bones that he would, in fact, be here the next morning; that there was no possible world in which he wouldn’t be. He opened his mouth to — what, protest? Ask questions? None of the jumble of thoughts in his head could quite resolve into words. 

She wasn’t even looking at his reaction, anyway. She had turned back to the desk, just long enough to get an old-fashioned canvas bank bag from one of the drawers. From it, she produced three crisp-looking fifty pound notes; these she held out to him. 

A hundred and fifty pounds was almost as much as he and his mum got in benefits for an entire week, and she was paying him that just to carry her shopping?

“I’m Martin,” he blurted, because...because that would make it all make sense. He could shape this into something normal, just making a little extra money helping a neighbor. (For a wildly over-broad definition of neighbor.) If he could pretend she had asked—

One corner of her mouth turned up. “A pleasure to meet you, Martin,” she said. “You may leave through the back.”

He took the money, stuffing it deep into his pocket where it couldn’t possibly fall out. “Thank you. Erm. ...See you tomorrow, then.”

She ignored him, turning her chair back to her desk instead. 

Martin ran half the distance home and still stumbled in late.  _ "Marcinku!"  _ his mum shouted as he hung up his jacket; he flinched. "Where have you been?"

"Out?"

"Out!" She was still sat in her usual spot in the lounge, though the television was dark. "Of course. God forbid I take a minute of your valuable time, after all. I'll just sit here until I rot."

Martin flinched. "I'm sorry, mum, I just got a bit, erm, side tracked?"

"Of course, of course!" She rolled her eyes, picking at the belt of her dressing gown with her good hand. "Co za głupiec zapomina o matce swojej...."

"I didn't forget you," Martin muttered, as he crossed the room to help her up.

"What was that?" she demanded.

"Nothing."

"Co powiedziałeś?"

"Nico," he said, louder. She grabbed onto him with her good arm and levered herself up from her seat; he tried to put everything about strangers and money and mind control out of his head. "What d'you want for supper?"

XXX

The woman in the wheelchair eventually introduced herself as Mrs. Dolores Crenshaw. She didn’t offer any information about the identity or disposition of Mr. Crenshaw, and Martin was too afraid to ask. But he came round the back of her house anyway, leaving early just to avoid that horrible blankness in his head. And then...he kept coming, long after she stopped reminding him to. 

Mrs. Crenshaw didn’t ask much of him, really. A lot of fetching and carrying, mostly, retrieving things from dusty upstairs rooms or returning them there when she was done with them. Sometimes he accompanied her around the shops, or did some odd jobs around her house. She didn’t ask him many personal questions, and didn’t answer any of the ones he hesitantly asked her. By the end of the month he knew more about her spiders than about her. 

He was also over five hundred pounds richer, thanks to the seemingly inexhaustible banker’s bag in her desk. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to when she paid him, and it was always in fifties or hundreds, which had him half-convinced she was part of some kind of counterfeiting ring. But if they were counterfeits, they were very good ones. And no matter how afraid he was — no matter how weird and invasive her orders were — he couldn’t turn the money down. The bank statements and bills wouldn’t let him.  

(“I’ve got a job,” he told his mum, thought she didn't give any sign that she'd even heard him. “They were a gift from one of the neighbors,” he told the woman at the jobcentre, when she noticed his new shoes. Both of these were lies, but he wasn’t sure if he knew what the truth  _ was,  _ so he told himself it didn't matter what he said.)

Really, he didn’t do for Mrs. Crenshaw anything that he didn’t already do for his mum. None of the … intimate things, thankfully, though. He didn’t even have to push her, because her chair was electric. He arrived a bit before nine every morning, and Mrs. Crenshaw was already waiting for him, with perfect accessories and the same brown-and-white blanket spread across her lap. He did whatever she asked, and eventually she did just ask instead of ordering him. If she didn’t have anything in particular for him to do, he might sit in one the armchairs or in the kitchen, reading — sometimes his own books, the ones he’d got for his literature A-level, or sometimes books of hers. Most of those seemed to be about either spiders or philosophy: Martin preferred the literature.

Either way, he was always able to leave by half-three, sometimes with a hundred pounds or more for his troubles, and he usually made it home in time for tea, and his mum couldn't nag him about it because he made sure she never missed her shows. (Not that she didn't try.)

He supposed there were a lot of worse ways to spend his time.

XXX

Mrs. Crenshaw could order people, Martin had learned that first hand, but it was a fact that sometimes squirmed away from him when he tried to think about it too hard. Maybe if he hadn’t seen her do it again, he might’ve convinced himself it hadn’t happened to him, that she had asked for help in a normal way and he’d given it out of the goodness of his heart. 

But she did it again — to a clerk in a shop, to a man at the bank, to a librarian who wouldn’t let her taken home a book from the reference section. Martin watched her do it, and watched the people she did it to. They didn’t turn into glassy-eyed zombies: they didn’t really look any different at all. They just did what she told them, and Martin knew it was because they could not fathom a world that worked any other way. 

Once she ran her chair too close to a young man, hardly older than Martin, who was smoking outside a pub on Bexley Square. The stream of slurs and curses he let out in response were enough to make the other pedestrians glance up and scowl. Martin, carrying the shopping again, had just hunched his shoulders and hoped that shouting was all the man planned to do; but Mrs. Crenshaw had stopped, and gone through the process of turning her chair to face him. 

She’d looked up at the sneering, red-faced man and said firmly, “Go home, young man. Sit in a corner. Think about what you’ve done.”

Martin watched that man (almost his age, though his clothes were a lot nicer) stop. Cock his head for a moment, like he was listening to the orders twice. Then, without another word, he flicked his still-burning cigarette into the gutter and walked away briskly, eyes clear and focused, head held high. 

This time, when they returned to Mrs. Crenshaw’s house, he put away her groceries while she fed the spiders. Then he sat down in one of the arm chairs and watched her dropping crickets into the terrariums, watched the tarantulas jolt into motion as they realized there was prey available.

“How," he asked, and she glanced over to him. He cleared his throat a bit. "How do they work? The … orders?”

She looked up properly, gave him one of those gimlet looks for a long time. He wondered if she was going to ignore the question, the way she ignored questions about her family or her work. He was somewhat surprised when she closed the terrarium lid and turned her chair to face him. “It’s easy to think of a person as one thing,” she said. “But that’s not quite true. Even the smallest, most innocent child is woven out of many pieces, and I happen to be better than most at knowing just which threads to pull.” 

He thought about this, and she kept watching him, waiting for an answer. “So the...the threads...it’s something a person would do anyway?” Martin said slowly.

“Perhaps.” She gave a little half-smile. “Weren’t you reading Whitman the other day? ‘I contradict myself; I contain multitudes.’”

“But if it was...could you order someone to do something...something they would never, ever do on their own?”

"And how can you be sure you wouldn’t do it?" she retorted. "That there’s no circumstances that could bring that out of you, short of me pulling your threads?”

It was hard to think in hypotheticals like this. “But if it’s already in me, why do you even need to...to pull? I...I would’ve helped you with your things if you’d just asked me.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” she said, returning her attention to the next tarantula. “The whole world pulls your threads, Martin. I just have a particular way of getting a grip on the one I want.”

She gave him some books to read, then, by authors like Foucault and Bourdieu, but he couldn't even pronounce their names correctly, much less understand what they were talking about.

(A week later, he saw on the news that a man had been found dead in his flat in Deansgate. A young man, not much older than Martin. The police didn’t think it was a murder; they said he must’ve been ill, because he’d been found sat in a corner of his bedroom, and the cause of death appeared to be dehydration.)

XXX

"Wear a suit tomorrow," Mrs. Crenshaw told him on a hot day in June, just as he was about to leave. "I have a lunch meeting."

Martin froze, because the last time he could remember wearing an actual suit — probably the only time, come to think of it — was his Confirmation when he was fourteen and six inches shorter. "I, erm," he said, looking down at his shoes. "I don't—"

She sighed. "Of course not," she said, but it sounded more like she was talking to herself than him. She rolled up to the desk and went for the bank bag that seemingly had no bottom, and offered Martin four hundred-pound notes out of it. "Get yourself something presentable, then. A shirt and tie as well. Do you own any shoes besides those? Of course not, forget I asked." And she laid a fifth note on top of the first five. 

He was holding in his hand more money than he had ever handled in his life. "I can't," he stammered, "I can't accept this—"

"It's not a gift," she said, piercing him with a look. "I'm making an investment. This may not be the first time you have to accompany me to a formal occasion and you need to be able to dress appropriately."

Which was how Martin ended up in Marks and Spencer, trying to figure out his measurements through trial and error. The staff were watching him closely, and he wasn't sure he was imagining their thinly veiled contempt. It had been years since he'd bought clothes from anywhere that wasn't a charity shop — actually, that Confirmation suit might've been it, and they'd gone to Primark for that. But he had an idea of what Mrs. Crenshaw would consider _presentable,_ given her own fastidious appearance, and it probably didn't involve polyester.

At one point one of the shop assistants came over to where he was inspecting himself in a mirror. "Is there anything I can help you with, sir?"

Martin had never been addressed as _ sir  _ in his life, and he froze for a moment before he managed to squeak, "No, no, I'm fine, thanks."

The assistant lingered near him for a moment, then said quietly, "You need a longer inseam."

"S-sorry?" Martin asked, feeling stupid and exposed.

"On your trousers," he elaborated. "You're, what, sixteen?"

"Eighteen," he insisted, even though it was two weeks until his birthday. 

The assistant nodded. "So there's a chance those'll look like waders in a year or two. Go about an inch and a half longer, they'll have a full break now and still look sharp if you get any taller."

"Okay," Martin said blankly. "Thanks." He had no idea what most of that meant, but he had never had this much money to spend on himself before and didn't know when he ever would again, so. Made sense to plan ahead.  _ Investment  _ and all. 

It was nearly closing by the time he approached the till with his purchases, after doing the math three times to make sure he wasn't spending more than Mrs. Crenshaw had given him. He'd hoped the same assistant who'd given him advice about the trousers would be there, but instead it was a sharp-faced older man who peered at him from over a pair of half-moon spectacles. "Did you find everything you needed today, sir?" he asked, but his  _ sir  _ was dripping with sarcasm.

"Erm, yes! Yes. I think." Martin dropped everything in a heap on the counter, then realized it would probably leave creases and started trying to smooth it out. The man not-so-gently pulled everything to his side of the counter, out of Martin's reach, to begin scanning it in.

"And how will you be paying today?" he asked after giving Martin the heart-stopping total. 

Martin took a deep breath, and pulled out the cash Mrs. Crenshaw had given him, which was now crumpled and a bit damp from being crushed in his pocket or his sweaty hands. He tried to iron each bill out on the edge of the counter before passing them over, not that it helped.

The man's eyes went narrow, and Martin abruptly realized that what he'd mistaken all evening for contempt was really suspicion. "I see. A moment, please." He took one of the hundreds by a corner, like he was afraid to touch it, and disappeared into a back room.

Martin began to quietly panic. He'd been worried ever since he met her that Mrs. Crenshaw's money was counterfeit or otherwise of suspect origin, so he'd tried to avoid spending too much of it in one place, even if it meant visiting every Asda in Greater Manchester. He supposed it was inevitable that his luck would run out eventually: a kid in ratty clothes who kept going in and out of the changing rooms had probably set off all the staff's alarm bells hours ago. He glanced up at the CCTV camera directly above the till, and wondered if it was too late to just run for it. 

No, the man was back already, still looking suspicious. "I'm terribly sorry, sir," he said with fake humility, "but we have a policy at this location regarding large bills when a senior manager isn't on duty. I'm sure you understand."

"Sure," Martin croaked.

"Would it be possible for you pay with a check or credit card?" he added.

It would not. Martin knew his mum's accounts balance down to the penny, and even if he'd had the debit card with him, the math wouldn't work out. He cringed, hating what he was about to do. "I'm really sorry, I need this for — for work, my boss only gave me cash, and I don't have time to come back in the morning."

"I'm afraid we can't—"

"I can leave my ID here?" he tried. "So you can send the police after me if it's counterfeit? I mean, it's not, of course it's not. Well. I wouldn't know if it is or not, she just gave it to me, but I don't think she'd do that…" He realized he was rambling and trailed off, looking pleadingly at the man behind the counter.

He only looked annoyed, though, not moved. "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

Desperation welled up in Martin's chest. "Please," he said, hoping irrationally he could pull one of those strings Mrs. Crenshaw had talked about, find some version of the world where he could just pay and leave like a normal person without having to beg. "Please, I really need these."

And something in the man's expression changed, suddenly. Not a blankness, not a deadness. Just a sudden shift from annoyed and suspicious to a blandly agreeable smile. "Of course, sir. Do you need a receipt?"

Martin's jaw dropped, and something low in his stomach locked up in a knot. But fear, for once, overrode shock. He took his change and bags with shaking hands, and bolted out of the store, all concerns about looking suspicious abandoned in favor of getting out of there before the clerk came to his senses. 

He stared out the window on the bus, shaking hands clamped around his bags, trying to work out what he'd done, how he'd … maybe he hadn't done anything. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe the clerk had just had a ... tiny stroke, or something, that made him forget the previous three hours of glaring at Martin from behind a rack of polo shirts.

It made as much sense as Martin suddenly developing  _ mind control powers.  _ Except he already knew it was possible to do what Mrs. Crenshaw did. He just didn't know how  _ he'd  _ managed it.

His mum told him off for being out late, and he apologized feverishly while he helped her to bed. He lay on his own bed for a long time before sleep caught up to him.

XXX

"You look like an undertaker," Mrs. Crenshaw concluded, "but at least it fits you properly. Come here, let me do your tie."

Martin's mum hadn't been able to hold a spoon this morning, let alone tie his tie for him as she'd done for his Confirmation. He hadn't had much luck following her instructions, either, and eventually she'd run out of patience, telling him to  _ get out of my sight and stay gone, for all I care _ . He'd carried her into the lounge anyway and brought her a drink before he left.

Mrs. Crenshaw's hands, by contrast, were cool and sure as she looped the fabric over itself and pulled it snug around his throat. She buttoned the top button on his jacket as well, and smoothed down the lapels. "There. Presentable, at least."

"I think I, erm, I think I pulled someone's threads," Martin blurted. "Last night."

Mrs. Crenshaw raised one eyebrow, and her eyes were sharp enough to pare him to the bone. "Did you do it on purpose?"

"N-no?"

"Did it work?"

He fought down a slightly hysterical giggle. "He didn't call the police on me, so…"

She patted his hand. "We'll talk about it after lunch."

Lunch turned out to be in a pub in Strangeways, which Martin wouldn't have expected to merit this level of formality, thought all but one of the people she met with were just as dressed up. There were two old white men, an Asian woman accompanied by a young girl who might've been her daughter or possibly her granddaughter, and a younger white man wearing jeans and a work shirt. He had a beard, and he leered at Martin when Mrs. Crenshaw wasn't looking. "Aren't you gonna introduce your little buddy, Dolores?" he asked after shaking her hand; he had an American accent, or maybe Canadian. 

"He is my assistant," Mrs. Crenshaw said. "Ignore him."

Under other circumstances, that might've hurt Martin's feelings, but when the American smiled his teeth seemed … wrong, too many of them or too many points or something. When Martin moved a chair aside so Mrs. Crenshaw could sit at the table, the American reached out with arm and blocked him into a corner. His forearm was bigger around than Martin's entire leg, with a thick thatch of coarse, dark hair exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. "The widow already call dibs on you, kid?" he asked Martin, still grinning too widely.

"Edward," one of the older men barked, and the American dropped his arm instantly. "Remember that you are here as a courtesy."

"Just having fun with him," Edward murmured, and he started to sulk. Martin was very, very glad he and Mrs. Crenshaw were sitting at the other end of the table.

They ate and talked for over two hours, and Martin listened quietly and understood almost none of it. Even the little girl seemed to know more of what was going on than he did, though that was probably because she was serving as an interpreter for her corresponding adult. It was weird, listening to a kid in a pink flower headband solemnly say things like "As long as the equilibrium between the foreigner and the liar serves our purposes we can concentrate our efforts on the devastation," while the adults around her nodded solemnly. Of course, Martin's definition of  _ weird  _ was probably overdue for a serious re-calibration...

"I don't have anything against the incestuous creeps," Edward said at one point, gesturing with his fork. (He'd order a double helping of black pudding and seemed unnervingly enthusiastic about it.) "I like big sky country as much as the next guy. But old choke's had a lot of time to get set up on the west coast, and if the Fairchilds send their institute snooping into it, we're all gonna have to take sides in a hurry, if you know what I mean."

"It won't come to that," one of the white men said; his name might've been Daryl, or Derrick. "Obviously the buried have our sympathies, but the institute doesn't answer to the expanse, and no one is taking sides yet. If they have an issue with the archivist, well, there's a branch in Washington, isn't there?"

"That's not the point," Edward tried to say, but Mrs. Crenshaw shushed him. 

It reminded Martin a little of when his parents used to argue, before his dad left. He would curl up in bed or on one end of the couch, unnoticed or forgotten, and while they weren't making any special effort to conceal anything, they also weren't bothering to clarify anything, either. He could just listen, remembering without understanding, even if he went back and looked up some of the words later.

He wasn't sure looking up the words this time would help — he had a feeling, for instance, that when they talked about "the eye" they weren't talking about a Ferris wheel in London. But he couldn't bring himself to just tune it out, either, picking at his burger and chips without really tasting them. Either they were discussing a lot of different people — groups? — or a small number of people who each had four or five names apiece, and Mrs. Crenshaw and her friends were trying to stop some of them from doing something, or maybe several somethings, to someone else. There was an institute that kept coming up, and a church, and he was pretty sure he heard someone mention a circus for some reason. 

By the end of it everyone seemed to feel they had decided something, but Martin couldn't have told you what it was. The man who was not Derrick asked Edward, "Do we have a deal regarding the worker of clay?"

"Consider it done," Edward said. 

The little girl whispered to her mother, and her mother whispered back. "The desolation is still on track to act before the great twisting comes to pass."

Mrs. Crenshaw said, "I'll have a word with Adelard," and then everyone stood and began to take their leave. Except for the little girl, who ran up to the counter and came back with an elaborate ice-cream sundae. 

Martin scrambled to keep up with Mrs. Crenshaw as she rolled out towards the nearest bus stop. When the bus came, he helped secure her chair before taking the folding seat facing her. "I imagine you have questions," she said serenely, even if her eyes were sharp as ever.

"I mean, yeah," Martin admitted. He felt safe loosening his tie a bit now that the formal part of the day seemed to be over. "Will — I mean, is it okay if I ask them?"

"You can ask," she said benignly. "I might not answer."

Well, that wouldn't be any different from usual, then. Martin glanced around the bus, not sure if anyone was paying attention to them or not, if it even mattered if they discussed this in public. Maybe it was just a really weird … club of some kind? Maybe it had nothing to do with mind control. Maybe Martin could persuade himself he was hallucinating everything and Mrs. Crenshaw was just a nice old lady … and maybe pigs would fly out of his arse, sure. 

He still waited until they got back to her house before he started asking. "Do you work with those people?"

"After a fashion," she said. "Edward is more of an independent contractor, and Kymbat and her daughter are visiting from a sister organization in Asia."

"And...what is it you do?"

"Benjamin, Derrick and I sit on the board of the Greater Manchester Human Development Foundation." She dug a business card out of her purse and offered it to him, not that he knew what to do with it: the logo was a spray of lines in different colors radiating from the center of several nested circles. Working for some kind of charity didn't explain all the money she was able to throw around, thought, nor most of the conversation he'd overheard …  

"Is any of this illegal?" Martin blurted before he could stop himself.  Because if he was putting himself in danger, putting his mum in danger in any way— 

Mrs. Crenshaw just raised an eyebrow at him, "Legality only matters if you're caught, Martin. I believe you said you avoided getting caught last night?"

Right. His stomach bottomed out just remembering the clerk's sudden change of demeanor. "I — I was just trying to pay for the clothes," he mumbled. "It's not like I stole them or anything."

"And when the interaction didn't go your way, you forced it," she said.

"No!" Martin wanted to explain he hadn't been trying to control anyone, he hadn't wanted to do any harm, he just wanted … he'd just … "A bit."

She nodded. "Tell me what happened from the beginning."

He did. He tried, anyway. Every time he started to drift from the topic, to justify or contextualize or explain, she cut him off and made him go back, until he could hardly keep the events straight in his own mind. Maybe he really had meant to do it. Maybe he hadn't done anything, and the clerk had just decided on a whim to have mercy on him. Maybe it was all some sort of big mistake. Maybe he'd dreamed it.

"Habits and routines are the easiest behaviors to draw out," Mrs. Crenshaw said when she finally let him stop. "And if you're lucky, he spent the rest of the night rationalizing away what he did, just as you have."

"I'm not rationalizing," Martin protested. "I didn't want—"

She reached out to put a finger to his lips. "Martin. I told you every person is a skein of many threads. You may not  _ want  _ to commands others, at least in this moment, but you absolutely did, and you have the potential to do so again. The only question is whether you'll act on that potential, or spend the rest of your life trying to bury it."

"I don't have any potential," he said when she dropped her hand. "Not for ... anything. Or I wouldn't be going to the jobcentre every week."

"That's right," she told him. "When I first saw you, you were just a helpless, hopeless person, radiating the despair that comes with being trapped in a web not of your own making. That's the whole reason I singled you out that day. It was a surprise that you didn't run. Surprise me again."

Martin thought of the confident ease with which Mrs. Crenshaw moved through the world, the determination with which she got anything she wanted. He thought about marching into the jobcentre again with no qualifications and no prospects and no hope while their bank account dwindled and his mother wasted away. 

He also thought about the dead man in Deansgate, who had only sort of deserved it. Or maybe that was just a coincidence. "Can I … if I change my mind … can I go?"

"Of course," Mrs. Crenshaw said, and it didn't even occur to Martin that she might be lying. 

He took a deep breath and nodded, even though she hadn't actually asked him a question. His heart was pounding, but he couldn't tell if it was anxiety or anticipation. "What — what do I do next?" 

Mrs. Crenshaw smiled.


	4. September, 2017

Martin gradually became aware again, of himself and his surroundings, as the unbearable need to speak faded away. His head was pounding, and his mouth had gone painfully dry. It took a moment to realize he was horizontal: he'd fallen to the floor at some point, and at some point Jon had joined him, sitting against the door with Martin's head in his lap and his fingers carding through Martin's hair. That part, at least, was nice.

Jon jerked his hand back, though, a moment after Martin had fallen silent. "Sorry," he said in a breathy rasp, as if he'd been doing the talking. "I didn't … I suppose I don't know my own strength."

Martin swallowed a few times before he managed, "It's fine." He made himself sit up and roll the stiffness out of his neck and shoulders. He still didn't  _ remember  _ properly: it was more like he'd been reading someone else's statement, who just happened to share his name. Whatever Jon had done hadn't been able to tear down the cobwebs in his head, just pull the story out  _ through  _ them, and Martin couldn't remember anything beyond what he'd just said.

Still. He had answers, now, to at least some of his questions. Though still not why the Web had sent him here, nor why Mrs. Crenshaw would choose now to pull back the veil on a decade of brainwashing….

Jon heaved himself to his feet and went to his desk, dropping heavily into his chair. "I'll have Melanie and Basira follow up on this Human Development Foundation," he said, almost slurring the words. "You and I can focus on locating Crenshaw and Dekker. Not that I expect Dekker to be easy to find, based on his reputation, but if he was seeking me out, that indicates a willingness to talk…"

Martin blinked as he trailed off. Jon looked about as wrecked as he felt, pale and jittery, and the torrent of words didn't really mask it. "Are you all right?" he asked, using Jon's desk for leverage as he clambered to his own feet.

"I should be asking you that," Jon mumbled, propping up his head in his hands. "Never had someone collapse while giving a statement before."

"I mean, it's not a typical statement, is it?" If Martin tilted his head just so, he could see the webs between them — a mesh of fragile threads built up over their years of working together, even before the archives, one strand at a time. He could feel the power twanging along each one, feel the Beholding pressing out behind Jon's skin like it could pull the rest of Martin's story out by sheer force. It probably could. 

"I could try," Jon murmured, even as Martin was thinking it. "Try asking you something else, I mean, but—"

"—but my brain might leak out of my ears before I'm done talking," Martin finished. Jon's gaze snapped up, alarmed. "I'm joking! That's a joke. I'm not — it's fine. I've got a bit of a headache, but it's fine. It's a figure of speech."

"Right." Jon slumped in his chair. "So. If Dekker's in London—"

"Jon." 

"—and we're not simply going to wait around for him to come to us—

"Jon."

"—and assuming he's somehow protected from supernatural means of—"

Martin reached over the desk and shut Jon's laptop, cutting him off. "I don't care if the Archivist needs to know how the story ends," he said. "Jonathan needs to rest. When was the last time you slept, anyway?"

Jon gave him a disgruntled look. "I'm not a child, Martin."

"Then maybe you should stop acting like one?" Jon, apparently not seeing the irony involved, pouted. Martin decided to try something else. "I need your help, Jon. Which means I need you to not end up back in hospital because you decided sleep is for humans. Okay?"

"All right," Jon said, reluctantly and after a lengthy pause. "Could — you should start—"

"I've got it," Martin assured him. "Go lay down."

(Martin didn't watch him go to the cot in the storage room, didn't hold his breath until the sound of creaking metal and canvas meant Jon had actually laid down. He went into his own office to use his own computer, and didn't wait — but he knew, somehow, when Jon was asleep, because the whole vibe of the archive subtly changed. The Eye, if not closed, was looking elsewhere.)

(It didn't even occur to him until later that Jon might not have been acting of his own volition.)

XXX

Martin kept dreaming about the Web and the Eye, the web  _ in  _ the eye, and every time he woke up with the answer just out of reach, on the tip of his tongue. He wanted scream. He wanted to hit something. He wanted to hurl that stupid paperweight at the wall. 

(He did; it chipped the plaster.)

_ "Steatoda nobilis,"  _ he told Jon, after he figured out how to take a picture through the Perspex and did a successful reverse-image-search. "The noble false widow."

Jon blinked. "Do you think that's meaningful…?"

Martin shrugged. "It's one of the only spiders in Britain with medically significant venom," he added, staring at the eye-pattern on its back. That wasn't right. None of the pictures online looked like that; the Wikipedia article said they were supposed to look like skulls. Which would technically be weirder, but still. 

(If he tilted his head the right way, he could see knots of spiderweb clinging to to the little resin dome. Threads of power and intention that hummed with something familiar, something that sounded like  _ secret  _ and  _ ours _ if he listened closely. But they were limp and torn, unmoored from whoever had created them: the damage had already been done.)

Jon took off his glasses to rub his eyes. "Neither Dolores Crenshaw nor Dolores Dekker show up in any of the usual database searches. Are you certain— no, of course you're not."

"Maybe it's a fake name," Martin suggested. "Like a failsafe against being compelled. One false story under another?" A web covering the eye like a veil…

"Occam's razor," Jon shot back. "We have no reason to assume it's wheels within wheels here."

"Webs within webs, more like," Martin muttered, but Jon ignored him.

(He kept dreaming of the Web, about an infinite sprawl of people and things that could be fit to a pattern if he only knew how. But also about being bound and held, embraced in the dark, snug and safe and loved… )

(He asked Jon to hold on to the trap door key, and Jon didn't question him.)

XXX

Melanie and Basira were...difficult.

"It's fine," Martin tried to say. "We don't — they don't have to know all the gory details."

"They're concerned about you," Jon said. "Concerned enough to bring it up to me, even. And speaking from experience....keeping it secret is likely to cause more harm than good."

And, well, he would know. 

Basira beat them to it, though; she laid out what little information they'd gathered about the Greater Manchester Human Development Foundation, which had apparently wound up operations some time in 2010, so no help there. "We haven't been able to track what they did with all their assets, but we did find an archived copy of the website, which included a list of board members … and staff."

She gave Martin the same sort of look she'd given him when she'd told him what Elias did to Melanie, the one that said  _ prove it  _ even without the words. Martin couldn't hold her gaze. "Yeah. Erm. About that…"

"So you  _ are  _ a spooky spider thing?" Melanie interrupted. "Did I win?"

Martin blinked.

"That wasn't actually a bet," Basira told her irritably. 

"How," he tried to ask, but he couldn't figure out how to complete the question. 

Melanie started ticking off on her fingers anyway. "There's about three hundred percent more spiders around here than usual. You  _ talk  _ to spiders, even when you're normal. You've been acting very much  _ not  _ normal ever since the spiders showed up. You scared the shit out of Amita What's-her-name when she tried to tell us about her spider problems, to the point where she was screaming at us over the phone. And then, when Jon turns up and wants us to drop everything to research a mysterious charity with, oh look, a spider web logo? There you are. We're not  _ thick,  _ Martin."

Now that she mentioned it, the logo sort of did look like a rainbow-colored spider web. Martin swallowed. "I wasn't … I wasn't lying on purpose," he said. "And I'm not a  _ thing.  _ I think."

"You think?" Basira repeated skeptically. 

Jon explained briskly, while Martin squirmed under two suspicious gazes. "And you're okay with all this?" Melanie asked when he was done.

"I trust Martin as much as I ever have," Jon said.

"Didn't you accuse him of murder?"

Jon glared at her. "That was  _ one time."  _

"Why?" Basira pushed. "No offense, Martin — but how are you so sure he's not a threat?"

"I just am," Jon insisted. She raised an eyebrow at him and scowled. "You seem to have a problem with that."

"The Spider's whole thing is mind control," she pointed out; Melanie sat up straighter. "How do we know you're not compromised?"

"I wouldn't," Martin protested, "I mean, I don't — not on purpose. Not to any of you."

"You're really not helping your case," Basira said flatly. 

"Well, what do you want me to say?" Martin asked desperately. "I've never hurt anyone? I don't know that. I've never controlled anyone? I don't know that. I'm not going to, to blow up the institute and kill us all?  _ I don't know that." _

She frowned. "Do you feel like blowing up the institute? Is that a thing we should be watching out for?"

Martin shut his eyes, and tried to calm his racing thoughts enough to think. What did he want? Another dose of ibuprofen, a cup of tea, a solution to his repressed memories, a job that wasn't evil, and possibly for Jon to pet his hair again the way he'd done while he gave his statement. Not that he'd say the last one out loud. "I don't think I feel much of anything?" he summed up. "Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. I...supposed I could keep you posted?"

Melanie tossed her head in Jon's direction. "What if he asks you? You know,  _ asks  _ asks?"

"We tried that, as it happens," Jon said snippily. "He nearly passed out. We will  _ not  _ be trying again."

For a moment, Melanie looked like she wanted to snipe right back at him. Then she sank into her chair, arms folded tight across her chest, giving both of them a calculated look. Martin was suddenly, acutely aware that the only thing scarier than Melanie in a towering rage was Melanie choosing to pick her battles. 

Basira, of course, was always tactical. "Right. I guess we have to take your word for it."

"Thank you," Martin said quietly, but she didn't look his way: she was looking at Jon, and the webs stretching in front of her face reminded him of fractured glass.

XXX

The more honest answer, and therefore the answer he couldn't actually give them, was: he  _ had  _ controlled people already. He had probably hurt them. He had a pretty good idea about what sort of things the Web ate — people, for instance — and no reason to assume he hadn't fed it before.

He had no reason to assume he could avoid feeding it now.

(Blowing up the institute felt a bit excessive, but he couldn't rule it out entirely.)

He flipped through the statements when Jon wasn't looking — but of course, he also knew what the Eye ate, and any spider monster that had figured out a non-violent approach probably wasn't going to feature in their archive. He laid awake at night, staring into the lattice of webs above his bed. He didn't want to hurt anyone, didn't think he had it in him to...

He thought about Elias's smug grin as the policeman dragged him away. 

Well, maybe just a little bit.

(Maybe that was all it took.)

XXX

It was Martin's turn on the rota again, for real this time, and he chose one of the spider ones he'd discovered. "I've re-read it about five times, I might as well," he pointed out, as if the others had questioned him on it. (They hadn't.)

Jon was out that morning, so Martin used his office again. He dithered a bit, locking the door and arranging his notes. He wondered what he'd do if it just … didn't work. If the Beholding rejected an offering from a foreign agent. On the other hand, he wasn't sure if the Web and the Eye weren't actually friendly; the spiders seemed quite happy in the archive, though that might've just been the silverfish. And also… what would that even mean, if a statement failed? How would they  _ tell? _

He stared into the two toothy holes of the cassette. He only imagined it was staring back at him. Probably

_ Click. _

"Martin Blackwood, archival assistant, recording case 9830409. Statement of Margery Lassiter regarding the children in her primary school class…"

It did feel different, as he went. Different even to the last one he'd done. Maybe it was the subject matter, or … he didn't know what it was. But this one felt easy, even as he sank into Margery Lassiter's panic and dread. There was no discordant buzzing in his head, and while he felt the weight of being watched, it didn't leave him breathless. He still lost himself a bit, but it was less a nightmare than a daydream. 

(Christ help him, but this one almost felt  _ good.) _

He shut off the recorder as soon as he finished the statement, ignoring what little follow-up he'd actually done. It wasn't even eleven o'clock yet, but he suddenly need to be out of the archives for a bit. "Lunch," he blurted to Melanie as he made for the stairs, barely remembering to get his jacket this time. 

He didn't even have a destination in mind, but it turned out he didn't need to; as soon as he came out of the institute's side door, he found Jon slouched against the nearby wall, smoking (though he dropped the cigarette and crushed it immediately, like a schoolboy about to be caught by a teacher). "Hi," Martin said, wishing he didn't sound quite so breathless.

"What on earth — you look — hi," Jon stammered, eyes going wide. Martin wondered, wildly, if he was seeing the Web close to the surface of him, the way Martin kept glimpsing the Beholding behind Jon's eyes. "You don't look … well."

This was a definite understatement. "Yeah, no. Erm. It's my turn in the rota."

"Ah." Jon bit his lip for a moment. "Was it—?"

"Weird," Martin said. "It was … really, really weird."

"Not just … normal weird?" Martin just looked at him, and Jon seemed to realize what he'd said. "I mean, weirder than usual?"

"Yeah." The webs were bad today; Martin tried rubbing his eyes and tilting his head, but he couldn't not see them, stretched between buildings and choking the sky. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was better off wrapped up in them than alone and exposed. And he really didn't feel like explaining all this to Jon, just then, even though he knew Jon would listen because  _ of course  _ he would. "Er. Where've you been, anyway?"

Jon accepted the change of subject. "I persuaded Amita Mahajan to finish her statement," he announced. "Well, 'persuade' might be the wrong word for it, but …I thought it might be related to your, er, situation. I'm not convinced it is, but at least we have a complete version on record."

"That's good." Martin watched Jon fish a new cigarette out of a crumpled, mostly-empty pack. "I mean, not good, but—"

"But … yes. Not like I was planning on sleeping tonight anyway. Er, no offense." He glanced up, holding up the cigarette between two fingers. "Do you mind if…?"

"No, it's fine."

Jon pulled out a lighter, a scratched and scuffed old zippo, and Martin could see it clearly. He could also see the thick knot of spiderwebs that coiled around it, twisting up Jon's wrist and arm like climbing vines, like the tentacles of some kind of sea creature. A part of him was vaguely surprised that the little flame didn't ignite them. 

"Can I," he blurted, heart racing. "Can I see that?"

"Hmm?" Jon frowned. "You don't smoke."

"The lighter, I mean."

Jon handed it over, looking bemused. It was warm in Martin's hand, though he wasn't sure if that was a spooky thing, or if it had just absorbed Jon's body heat. (A tether of invisible silk still clung to him, as if the lighter was reluctant to let him go.) Martin turned it over, and realized that the thin lines he'd thought were simple scuff marks on the dull chrome were actually a delicate radial pattern.

He realized where he'd seen this lighter before. 

"Martin," Jon prompted, looking openly concerned again. About Martin, though, not about the lighter he'd been carrying for over a year. 

Martin ran his thumb across the engraved spider web and tried to feel for the invisible one, or listen for it, or—he didn't actually know how any of this worked. If he could tell what the lighter was doing, what it was for, just by touching the threads that only he could see anyway. He felt for the vibration he was learning to recognize, the one that said  _ Web _ and  _ secret  _ and  _ ours.  _

And under that he found a harmony line, of  _ ours  _ and  _ safe  _ and  _ love  _ and  _ love  _ and  _ love _ —

He threw the lighter to the pavement in a moment of panic. "For god's sake, Martin!" Jon snapped, eyes wide..

"I'm sorry," he blurted instead. "I—I need to go."

Jon's face hardened, and Martin could see the Archivist surface in him, the need to  _ know.  _ Could see Jon fight it down. "I trust you," was all he said, stiff and cold like cursing.

_ You probably shouldn't,  _ Martin thought, but he couldn't bring himself to say so. He just left.

XXX

Here was what Martin knew:

He had noticed Jon from his first day at the institute. Of course he had: Jon wasn't bad looking when he wasn't dressed like someone's grandad, the threads of silver in his hair suited him, he was clever and confident and utterly dismissive of Martin's attempts at small talk. Of course Martin had been drawn to him; he was always attracted to unattainable people.

He'd started crushing on Jon while he was living in the archives, and he'd told himself it was just stress and proximity. Not, for instance, a revelation about just how good Jon looked with his shirtsleeves rolled up and tie pulled loose. Or how vulnerable he looked when he fell asleep at his desk (again). Martin had been traumatized at the time; he would've gotten attached to a brick if it had offered him understanding and a safe place to hide. 

He'd fallen really, properly in love with Jon … it had probably started when they were trapped in the old document storage, having their first proper conversation (which was nearly their last). It had definitely been a problem when Jon was withdrawn and paranoid and accusing people of murder, and then abruptly decided it was  _ Martin  _ he could trust. By the time Jon went into hiding, not seeing him had been like going without air, and he couldn't imagine it being any other way.

But he'd never really acted on any of it, never even talked about it with anyone else. Because he didn't know Jon, and when he did Jon didn't like him, and when Jon did seem to actually like him— 

If he did actually like Martin, apparently there was every chance he'd been  _ brainwashed by spiders to do so. _ So. Bit of a damper on things. 

Was that the long game, then? Insert Martin into the archive, insert a command into the Archivist — no, that was ridiculous, even for an eldritch fear god. It had still been Gertrude, for one thing, when Martin arrived. There were too many coincidences: that she had died, that Jon or someone like him had even been there to take her place, that Martin had been reassigned and—

Well. Maybe it wasn't that much of a coincidence, that Martin had fallen so hard. He'd still been the Web's, all this time, and if It wanted him to fall in love he didn't know if he'd have much choice in the matter. He wasn't even sure how he'd know the difference. 

Martin dreamed about the Web that night, and he dreamed about Jon, and the two overlapped until they were laying together on a bed of silk, safe and happy and together and  _ home,  _ while the Eye loomed overhead like a vast and rolling moon.

Martin started calling in sick to work. 

XXX

_ Why am I hearing from Rosie that you've called in? _

_ Where are you? _

_ Are you actually ill? _

_ Are you ignoring me on purpose? _

_ I can't actually compel you over the phone I think.  _

_ You're not picking up for any of us then? _

_ If you recall what happened the last time 'you' called out unexpectedly ill you will understand why I am concerned. _

_ Just answer your phone, Martin. _

_ Please call one of us back. It doesn't have to be me. _

_ Let me help.  _

_ I know where you live. _

_ That sounded excessively threatening, sorry.  _

_ I just want to know you're safe. _

_ Are you even reading these? _

_ Please call. _

XXX

Three days into Martin's paranoid self-exile from the archives, he got an email. He spent the whole morning ignoring it, on the assumption that it was either Jon, or the latest innocent bystander Jon had bullied into acting as a go-between. But since it was an e-mail rather than a text, he decided it was at least equally likely to be something he actually had to pay attention to, like an alert from his bank or some kind of veiled threat from Peter. 

It wasn't any of those things, though. It was an address, and a time, sent from dkkr1948@gmail.com. 

Specifically, it was a coffee shop on Vauxhall Bridge Road, the one Martin persisted in thinking of as  _ Sasha's  _ coffee shop, even though he had no idea whether the real Sasha had anything to do with it. Dangerously close to the institute, that, especially for four o'clock in the afternoon. Not that Martin had to worry about being accused of malingering, but if Basira or Melanie or, god help him, Jon spotted him, he really, really didn't want to explain how he'd come to the conclusion that he might actually be a threat after all. 

On the other hand, he didn't think he'd get another chance to talk to Dekker, and if Dekker could explain … well, anything … 

Martin threw on a dark-colored hoodie and a hat, and headed out. 

The coffee shop was busy, but somehow Dekker had a large table all to himself in a little pocket of relative quiet. There was a mug at his elbow, and he was reading a paperback; his half-a-moon reading glasses made him look vaguely professorial. Martin dropped into the chair next to him, the one that put his back to a wall. Dekker held up one slim finger for a moment, then placed a bookmark and looked up. "Mr. Blackwood. Good to see you again."

Martin hesitated, feeling suddenly, vaguely resentful of the man who'd triggered a seismic shift in his life and his own sense of self. "Did Mrs. Crenshaw send you after me again?" he asked.

Dekker raised one eyebrow. "So that's what she's calling herself these days? The answer is no, by the way; as it happens, I'll be paying a visit to the Archivist later, and I had some free time before then."

"Right, of course," Martin muttered; that explained the location and timing. "A little spider tell you he's awake, then?"

"Something like that," Dekker admitted. "Though I'm not much closer to Aranea than any of the other powers." 

"Funny way of showing it." Martin could see how few threads twisted around Dekker, how still they all were, but that didn't mean anything. (He still didn't actually know what that meant.)

"Think what you like." Dekker took a sip of his coffee. "What was in the package, if I may ask?"

For a moment Martin's entire brain just stopped. "You—you mean you don't  _ know?" _ he stammered.

Dekker shook his head. "As I said, I was the errand boy. The only interest I have in Dolores' schemes these days is whether she's killing people with them." He narrowed his eyes. "She isn't, is she?"

"Well, not yet," Martin said, "but you know, it's early. Also I don't know what she actually  _ did  _ to me."

Dekker raised an eyebrow. "I was under the impression I was delivering a message, not a curse. What exactly has she done now?"

Martin really didn't feel like running out the whole story yet again, especially not in public and  _ especially  _ not to a near-stranger. But any help was more than he had without putting Jon … without going back to the institute, for the time being. "Apparently I used to work for her? And I think I must've...pledged myself, or whatever, to the Web. I can't remember more than two years of my life, and I'm afraid she sent me to the Magnus Institute to do … something bad. I just don't know what."

Dekker nodded along with this. "Have you told the Archivist?"

"Most of it? But … but I'm worried he might be the target." He swallowed around a sudden tightness in his throat. "My target."

Dekker didn't immediately respond, but rather seemed to be thinking carefully, which Martin appreciated. At least for the first ten seconds or so. Then he began to squirm, wondering if he was about to get a kebab skewer in the eye, or were. "The sympathies between powers are difficult to track sometimes," Dekker said, finally. "And Aranea is usually the most difficult of all. Your institute rarely makes enemies — well, Gertrude did, but she was something of a special case. By the same token, though, Observator rarely makes friends. Allies, sometimes, but not friends."

"Like you and Gertrude?" Martin guessed.

Dekker flashed a brief smile. "I like to think we were more friendly than not. Particularly after I divorced Dolores. But she choose to focus on the great rituals, the great threats, rather than cleaning up the lesser monsters and day-to-day nightmares."

That sounded about right, from what Martin knew of her. "And you...I mean, you said you're not part of the Web."

"No," he said, sounding surprisingly equanimous about the whole thing. "Dolores made her choice, and I made mine." 

"To worship an eldritch spider monster and to … not do that."

He shrugged. "It was a long time ago."

Martin sighed. "I don't suppose you have any idea of how to tell … how to pick apart what's  _ me  _ and what's  _ it."  _ What was  _ Jon  _ and what was  _ Archivist  _ and what was winding its way under his skin from the lighter he didn't seem to recognize as a threat.

"If I knew that, I would be much better at what I do," Dekker said. "Disentangling the Web from its own schemes is hard enough without picking out every individual trapped in it."

"What do you mean?"

Dekker drained his coffee cup and set it aside. "Aranea, more than any almost any other power, has many guises," he said. "You've heard the saying about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing? Now imagine you have eight hands. Or eighty. All the entities are prone to working at cross-purposes from time to time, but I think the Web enjoys setting its own followers against one another. Maybe it's a form of misdirection? A greater design? But personally, I tend to think it's just keeping them sharp."

"Wait, so…" Martin sat up, head spinning. "So Mrs. Crenshaw might have had one reason for sending me to the institute, and … and the lighter might be a completely unrelated thing?"

"What lighter?" Dekker's voice suddenly went hard and low, and again Martin thought about skewers.

"Jon has a lighter with a spiderweb design on it," he explained. "It was...I think the Stranger sent it? Or, you know, those creepy delivery men that work for it, Breekon and Hope. But he just uses it like a regular lighter. I don't think he even remembers there's anything spooky about it."

Dekker hesitated for a moment and pulled something out of his own pocket — another zippo lighter, not quite identical to Jon's but close. The chrome plating was worn off at the corners, but it still had a clear engraved design on the front: a three-pointed figure that coiled and curled in on itself, splitting off into ever-small spirals that continued to twist and spin, smaller and smaller but no less precisely cut. Studying it made Martin dizzy, and he thought he could feel a discordant buzzing a lot like the one Helen gave off. "Like this one?" Dekker asked. 

"Something like it, yeah," Martin said, trying not to make it obvious that he was leaning away from it. 

"Interesting." Dekker pocketed the lighter again. "There's a history to these lighters, one I've still not entirely pieced together. I came upon this one quite by accident at the turn of the century; the only other one I knew of in Europe was Observator's, and that was destroyed by the Lightless Flame in 2011."

"What do they do, though?" 

"Well, for starters, they're a very effective way of destroying things," he said dryly. "Even some that wouldn't normally be vulnerable to fire. Carrying one also provides a certain measure of passive protection, at least against some of the other powers. More like a good luck charm than a shield – Aranea's lighter might help the Archivist evade Desolatio or Solus, for instance, but wouldn’t be much good if he walked right up to one of their agents and shook hands."

(Martin cleared his throat, and hoped Dekker didn't notice.)

"But everything has a price," Dekker continued. "Shutting out some powers invites the others in. I like to think I'm too much of a canny old bastard for Mendax to easily lure me astray, but it's not called the Liar for nothing, and I don't use this thing casually."

Whereas Jon had been using his to stress-smoke for the better part of a year, at least. Martin rubbed his eyes. "But there's no way to really tell how it's affected him, and the Web being what it is, I might not even be able to persuade him that it  _ has  _ affected him. Assuming  _ I'm _ not some kind of secret assassin sent to murder him in his sleep…"

Dekker huffed. "That's hardly Dolores' style, for what it's worth. If she really was playing a long game to suborn the Archivist, she would've positioned you to actually get the job yourself."

Except for that, she wouldn't have sent Martin. She would've sent someone Elias might have respected, rather than someone he'd persistently overlook. Someone with an actual CV instead of a collection of carefully arranged lies. Someone Elias would never suspect, because in hindsight Elias must’ve known Martin was lying through his teeth during that interview and for some reason decided to hire him anyway. But only about his age and experience, because his ties to the Web had been locked away behind a layer of cobweb even the Archivist couldn't easily break through. Elias had known Martin only as a barely-twenty-year-old with no qualifications and the temerity to lie about both those things, and let him think he was getting away with it … why?

How many webs was he caught in, exactly?

"Not to interrupt your reverie," Dekker said, "but I do have to depart if I want to catch the Archivist. Perhaps I'll show him my lighter while we talk."

"Yeah," Martin said, then dragged his thoughts away from Elias and his schemes. "Could you, um… could you not tell him you saw me? I mean, obviously if he asks-asks you'll have to, but…"

"But who I spend my time with is no one's business but my own." He gathered up his book and a slim black satchel, and stood. "If he wants to know where I got my information, I'll simply say a little spider told me."

Martin cringed at the description, but still remembered to thank him before he slunk back to the Tube. 

XXX

So if Dekker didn’t know, and Jon couldn’t ask, and they couldn’t find Dolores Crenshaw at all...

Well. There was still one place Martin could go for answers. He just wasn’t sure what else he’d come back out with. 

He'd found a new tape recorder for his poetry at a charity shop; he put a fresh tape in, and tried to explain. From the beginning, even if he’d been over all of it before. Put it down in one place, maybe for the last time, so the others would know – so  _ he  _ would know – what had happened, if this went really wrong. 

(He couldn’t think of many ways this could go that could be described as  _ right,  _ of course, but  _ wrong  _ was still a matter of degree.)

“I’m sorry for doing it this way,” he said into the tape. “For...whatever I do after. But I have to know. I have to be sure, even if that costs me something. I think you understand that, Jon, if anyone does.”

He waited until it was late, and wore a hoodie and dark trousers just in case. He waited until anyone who might see him slip into the Institute from the side door was gone for the night. He crept down to the archives, and listened at the door. The vibration on the edge of his hearing, like a television on mute, that meant Jon was there. The absence of sound or movement that meant Jon was asleep.

Martin eased the door of the archives open and walked softly over to the document storage room. He put a hand on the door and listened, but—no. Not the sound or vibration or whatever it was that said  _ Jon.  _ Of course it couldn’t be that easy. He crossed to Jon’s office door and listened again, crossed his eyes and tilted his head until the webs came into focus. Asleep at his desk again, of course. For a moment he felt a surge of tenderness, like a punch in the stomach, but it wasn't enough to stop him from easing the door open and slipping inside.  


Jon lay with his head pillowed on one arm, which was propped up on a stack of files; his laptop was still open, but the screen had gone dark. Martin walked as lightly as possible around the side of the desk, but he forgot about the squeaking floorboard, the one that still had fingernail gouges deep in the wood. For a second Jon’s face spasmed towards waking--

“ _Shh_ ,” Martin said desperately, and at the same time reached out for the threads only he could see. The sound shivered down one of them, and Jon relaxed again, but Martin still waited several seconds before he dared move again.

He had to check both sets of drawers before he found the key to the trap door. Jon didn’t stir a second time, though, which was … unnerving. Then again, whatever the Archivist was, Jon’s body needed the rest, and maybe that was enough to get his brain to go along with whatever Martin had done to it. (Maybe Martin was rationalizing.) He pocketed the key when he found it, and then, because he couldn’t  _ not  _ do it, he shut the laptop and draped Jon’s jacket over his shoulders. He left the tape where Jon would see it whenever he woke up, and switched the lights off on his way out the door.

The tunnels were no darker than usual, and the spiders weren’t any more numerous (thanks, Melanie). Martin found the tunnel lined with webs easily enough, and it was no wider and no less choked. He couldn’t see the end of it no matter how he angled his torch. 

He switched the torch off and left it at the mouth of the tunnel, just in case. 

He walked in.


	5. November, 2006

Martin hefted the bag, and gave it a little swing as he tossed it over the bridge's railing; it splashed when it hit the water and swiftly dropped out of sight. When it hadn’t bobbed back up after five minutes, he guessed it had hit bottom. If it hadn’t, well, hopefully by the time it washed up it would be far downstream, without any signs left to tie it back to them or the foundation. 

(One part of him knew what it meant when Mrs. Crenshaw or Mr. McEvoy told him to  _ get rid of this  _ and handed him a lumpy trash bag, or an old suitcase stained red and brown and black. That part stayed carefully partitioned away from the part that planned out where to dump these things, whether he could risk burning another one so soon or whether they needed to go into the river, and where and when to do it. Skeins, just like Mrs. Crenshaw always said, threads held carefully apart so they never, ever touched.)

Dave had parked the foundation's van further up the road, where there was room to turn around properly, and Martin walked back with his hands his pockets against the November chill. He reflexively pressed close to the crash barrier when he glimpsed headlights through the trees; when he realized the headlights were stationary, his stomach sank, and he broke into a jog. Sure enough, a police car had pulled up behind the van, and one constable was shining her flashlight into the driver's window. Dave wasn't looking at her, which didn't necessarily mean anything, but the strident tone of her questions didn't bode well.

Martin took a minute to wrap himself in an armor of  _ nice young white man,  _ and then started waving as he ran up. "Hey! Hi! Is there a problem?"

Dave still didn't move or react. The constable turned her torch towards Martin, sizing him up and seeing, he hoped, exactly what he wanted her to see. "You with him?" she asked, tossing her head at Dave.

"Yeah, sorry, I just stepped away for a minute," Martin said, coming to a stop a non-threatening distance from her and the van. There was another constable in the car, watching all this warily, but he focused on the one in front of him, and weaving away her suspicion and alarm. "How can we help you?"

A shadow of confusion passed across her face for a moment, as if she knew she should be focused on the silent man in the van, but then it passed and she was explaining, "You can't be parked here. You're blocking a private drive."

"Oh, sorry, I didn't realize," Martin said earnestly. Over the constable's shoulder, Dave opened his mouth, revealing the head and front legs of a massive black spider ready to crawl out and attack. Martin shook his head slightly, and Dave shut his mouth again. "We'll get moving right away."

"See that you do," the constable said gruffly. She glanced back at Dave, as if some part of her still remembered there was a problem with him — Martin glanced to the other constable with a thought towards  _ argument,  _ and a moment later he was leaning out the window and calling to his partner to  _ get back in the bloody car, it's too cold for this. _

Martin quickly jumped into the van's passenger side; the two police were still bickering as Dave started the van and pulled away.

"That was stupid," he said out loud, not that Dave reacted. Martin didn’t dislike Dave, exactly, but it was a little grating that  _ he _ couldn’t manage to pass his driving test while Dave apparently had. Then again, maybe Dave had already had his license when the spiders hollowed him out. Or maybe he was a bit less scrupulous about commanding the examiner, which had been Mrs. Crenshaw's advice when Martin failed the second time. Either way Martin thought it was deeply unfair that a spider collective in a person suit was allowed to drive the foundation’s van and he was not, especially if said spider collective was going to go around antagonizing the police.

Martin's phone rang while he was stewing on this, and at the same time he felt a tug in the back of his mind, the now-familiar thrum of Mrs. Crenshaw twisting the threads that ran between them.  _ “Where are you?”  _ she asked as soon as he answered, sounding strangely urgent for the time of night.

“I’m just on my way back to Salford with Dave,” he explained. 

_ “Meet me at the main office as soon as possible.”  _

“Okay, but—” She had hung up, though. Martin frowned at the device in his hand like it knew anything. Then he glanced at Dave. “Did you get that?”

Dave did not nod, but the concept of assent manifested in Martin’s brain, and the car sped up as they turned onto the A57. Martin bit his lip but didn't say anything; he really, really hoped they wouldn’t have to deal with any more police.

The foundation’s main office was in Spinningfields, in one of the glossy new high-rises that had started popping up like so many steel mushrooms. Dave dropped Martin off at the end of the road and then left to park; Martin kept his head up and walked with a purpose, and if anyone thought it was suspicious that a young guy in casual clothes was walking around an office building this late at night ... well, they didn’t think that for long.  _ Nice young white man _ , after all. Anyone watching wouldn't look at him twice.

Most of the people who worked for HDF were normal. Most of them genuinely wanted to foster potential and promote education and all the other flowery bits of the mission statement. Most of  them knew Martin as the director’s PA, albeit one who spent far less time fetching coffees and doing the scheduling than that title might’ve implied. And the part of him that he walled off and saved for the foundation liked the work, liked being helpful, liked the normal people in the office just fine. 

But the director didn’t need him doing the scheduling, and he didn’t actually spend a lot of time in this office, compared to Mrs. Crenshaw’s house in Salford or Mr. Stross’s flat in the North Quarter. So he initially wasn’t sure if the lights were supposed to be blazing well past midnight, or if there was meant to be quite so much noise come out of the back of the office. If he stopped and concentrated, he could sense — something. The twisting, jangling presence of a crowd of people, some he could place and some he couldn't, but tangled up and hard to pick apart. Mrs. Crenshaw had told him to be there, though, and it wasn't so much that Martin trusted her as that disobeying wasn't really an option. 

The source of all the commotion turned out to be a crowd gathered in the conference room, chatting loudly and passing around what looked an awful lot like champagne to Martin’s (admittedly inexperienced) eye. Theresa, the director, was there, as were all three of the main trustees, and a few people who weren’t associated with the foundation but who Martin knew as being part of the Web. Not any of the hollow ones – they probably wouldn’t have been able to drink champagne even if they were offered it – but a few Martin had never seen before except in deep shadow or swaddled in heavy coats. Under the conference room’s glaring fluorescents, the effect was ... unsettling. 

He walled that reaction off like he walled off everything, and found his way to Mrs. Crenshaw’s side. “I took care of the thing—” he started to tell her.

“Oh forget about that,” she said expansively, and pressed a plastic flute of champagne into Martin’s hand. “We’re celebrating.”

“...okay?” He glanced around, but Theresa and Mr. Stross were in an animated conversation with something of many arms and many eyes, and Mr. McEvoy was fiddling with someone’s laptop and the overhead projection system. Mrs. Crenshaw was always on him to be more observant and put facts together for himself, but he really couldn’t think of any reason for all of them to be in such high spirits. “Celebrating ... what, exactly?”

Someone shouted “The bitch is  _ dead!”  _ and there was a loud cheer throughout the room, or in the case of those without conventional vocal tracts, a chittering click that approximated a one. Mrs. Crenshaw tapped her champagne flute against Martin’s and drank deeply, so Martin quickly did the same. Or tried to, anyway: he'd never actually had champagne before, and more it probably went out his nose than down his throat, burning all the way.

He quickly wiped his face and asked, “Which — I mean, erm, who? Who died?”

“Agnes Montague,” Theresa proclaimed, coming over to them and leaning on the back of Mrs. Crenshaw’s chair. “The only one of Fire’s children with any brain or tactical sense. She killed one of ours ages ago—”

“Raymond got himself killed with his own carelessness,” Mrs. Crenshaw said coldly, and reached back to tap Theresa’s hand. Theresa instantly snapped upright and slapped herself across the face, hard enough to leave a red mark. “But it’s true Montague was the driving force of the Lightless Flame in Britain,” Mrs. Crenshaw continued as if nothing had happened. “And tonight, instead of ascending into her own power, she’s dead, and the rest of her cult are scrambling to salvage their plans for the Wrack.”

Martin knew just enough about the Lightless Flame to be scared of them. Mr. Stross had showed him a book once that smelled like burnt hair and petrol, and explained what was inside:  _ It is chaos. It is the breaking of all bonds. It is destruction for destruction’s sake. And what are we?  _

This part had been as familiar as a catechism by then. More familiar, in fact, given the somewhat dubious Sunday schooling that had lead up to his Confirmation.  _ The Web is control. The Web is order. The Web binds us, and the Web protects us.  _

_ So you can see why we hate the sons of bitches, yes? _

Toasting anyone’s death still felt rude, but whatever rack Mrs. Crenshaw was referring to couldn’t be anything good if it came from the Lightless Flame. So Martin took a more cautious swallow of champagne, and went to help Mr. McEvoy with the computer. Within a few minutes they had a bunch of his cheesy 80s music blasting, and one of the many-armed things started to dance to it.

XXX

(Sometimes Martin still shied away from the pull of the Web on his thoughts, the commands from the others, now that he could feel and understand what they were. He was doing it less and less though. There was something to be said for just going along with what he was told to do: he liked the clarity of it, and the utter absence of responsibility.)

(Most of the time Martin shied away from outright commanding anyone, not if he could redirect or defuse or avoid. Mrs. Crenshaw was always pushing him to do it, telling him he needed to develop his skills. It felt too clumsy, though, a blunt instrument: he didn't want to risk the attention when he could just as easily go unseen.)

XXX

Martin woke up on the couch back at home, uncertain how exactly he’d got back there. For a moment, he couldn’t tell the pounding of his headache from the irregular thumps on the ceiling; then he looked at the clock on the old VCR and realized he’d overslept. He scrambled up the stairs then, fighting down nausea (walling it off, separating it all out and putting it aside), and found his mother on the floor of her bedroom in her nightgown, crying quietly. “Oh, christ, I’m sorry,” he blurted, kneeling down to gather her up.

“Spierdalaj,” she slurred in response, and tried her best to push him away even though her whole right side had finally given up a couple months ago. “Don’t  _ touch _ me.”

He set her back onto the bed – she got thinner all the time, it seemed, or maybe the bags he was throwing in the river were getting heavier. (Compartmentalize. Wall it off.) “I’m sorry,” he said again, “I just … I had a few drinks with some people from work, I must’ve dozed off downstairs--” 

“I don’t care,” she said through tears. “I don’t care. I want out.”

_ This _ again. “I just forgot, Mum. I won’t do it again.”

“I want  _ out.”  _ She shoved him away with what passed for her good arm. “Tego miejsca nienawidzę, tego domu nienawidzę,  _ ciebie-” _

“Mum,  _ stop it.” _

He didn’t like doing this. He didn’t like having to do it. But sometimes it was just easier than fighting her, when she got like this. It was for her own good. (And it was such a _relief,_ in a petty, guilty way, to stop the snapping and the snarling and the insults—but he tried not to think about that aspect of it too hard or for too long.) She had to eat, she had to go to her appointments, and it was easier if he just … made her do it. Or at least made her quiet and still so he could do it for her.

He made her still and quiet so he could check that she wasn’t hurt – she couldn’t always tell anymore, and sometimes wouldn’t tell him even if she knew, when she got in a mood. There didn’t seem to be any bruises or bleeding, but she’d wet the bed, and he cursed himself again for oversleeping. 

Martin talked while he cleaned her up and changed the sheets, more to fill the silence than because she needed the narration. “I’m sorry I’ve been working so much lately. I know I haven’t been around much for you. But you know, I’ve almost got the credit cards all paid off? Just a few more months and we’ll be set. I can hire a home care nurse for you, and maybe get you one of those power chairs like Mrs. Crenshaw has so you can get around a bit easier. It’ll be nice, yeah?”

She hesitated, like she wasn't sure she could respond, even though he'd let the thread fall slack as soon as he got her into a clean nightgown and into her chair. "I don't want to stay here," she eventually said in a quiet, sulky tone. "I don't like this house."

"It's our home, Mum," Martin said, hating the slight whine that crept in. "It'll be fine. Once everything's paid off—" But she just started crying again, quiet little gasps while the tears rolled down her face. He sighed, and spread the duvet flat. "Right. Breakfast, then."

"I'm not hungry," she said.

"You need to eat something."

"Let me go."

"You're home," he said firmly. "You don't have to go anywhere."

(He fixed her a bowl of oatmeal and made certain she ate every bite.)

XXX

(He didn't like hurting people. Usually. Much. He liked having control of a situation, and Mrs. Crenshaw liked to argue that it amounted to the same thing. That it was a different of how much, not what kind, and arguing about intentions was hair-splitting and rationalization. Martin tried to argue back that intentions did matter, and so did limits, but she kept twisting his words back at him and jumping between hypotheticals until he couldn't remember his own point anymore.)

(He didn't do these things to be cruel, though. He liked to think that mattered.)

XXX

Mrs. Crenshaw summoned him to her a few days later with a tug at his brain, and Martin obeyed it because that was how his world worked, now. He thought maybe she just needed his help with the shopping again — it wouldn't have been the first time — but when he found her in the front room she directed him to sit in one of the armchairs instead. 

For a few minutes that was all he did, while she wrote at her desk. He looked at the books on the coffee table: there was the Foucault book she'd tried to make him read (at least until she got tired of him pronouncing it "fow-kalt"), and two he hadn't seen before, one of which seemed to be partly in Spanish. He picked up the Spanish one and flipped through a few pages before a poem caught his eye. The facing page had an English translation:  _ Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover / Lover transformed in the Beloved! /  Upon my flowery breast / Kept wholly for himself alone / There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him … _

Martin set that one down, and tried to will away his sudden blush. He was only partly successful.

When Mrs. Crenshaw finally turned her attention to him, she rolled close to him and gathered the books into her lap. She looked immaculate, as always, even though Martin's last clear memory of her from the night of the party had involved running mascara and a bottle of gin. Then again, she'd had a few days to recover her composure, and that had been a special occasional anyway. 

"I'm sorry if the revelry over Montague's death took you by surprise," she began. "Some of us have been waiting a very long time to see the Lightless Flame get their comeuppance, and we may have gotten a bit … carried away."

"No, it's — I had fun," he said quickly. "And I know they were … bad."

She huffed slightly. "That is one way of putting it. Has Benjamin or Derrick explained to you about the Infinite Tapestry?"

Martin shook his head.

"This was fifty years ago now," she said with the cadence of a storyteller, folding her hands atop the stack of books. "I was only a bit older than you, newly married, newly bound. Some of our elders had been working in secret for centuries, carefully weaving their own sections into being, and we were about to bring them together for the final ritual. A vast and intricate pattern that would've woven the whole world new. We had allies among some sympathetic powers, those who were still years away from their own attempts at ascendance, but we also had rivals, chief among them being the Lightless Flame."

"Can I—?" Martin asked hesitantly, and Mrs. Crenshaw nodded at him to continue. "What do you mean, weave the world new?"

"What do you think that means?" she asked him. 

This wasn't the first time she'd reversed a question at him, and he knew she wouldn't answer unless he made a serious attempt at a guess.  _ Weaving _ usually referred to the threads of connection between people or the skein of their own self… "If a person is a skein, then … then other things could be skeins, too," he said cautiously. "So if the world is a skein, and you could figure out how to twist it … ?"

"Precisely," she said, with a wide smile. "Imagine if we could make the Web encompass the whole world. Everyone, everything you know, bound and ordered and connected. No more uncertainty or conflict or confusion. That's the world we were trying to weave, an infinite tapestry of humanity. And of course, it's a world in which the Ruin or the Slaughter would no longer exist.  _ Could _ no longer exist."

Part of Martin agreed that this sounded nice — peaceful, even friendly. Another part of Martin understood that this sounded like hell, a world without privacy when your mind and body were never fully your own. (He knew what it meant to twist and writhe and choke in the Web's grip, and he knew how to feel simultaneous sick and fascinated, empowered and ashamed.) He still wasn't sure how it was even possible — it had taken him months to work out how to even feel out the threads that made up the Web, much less manipulate them on purpose, and Mrs. Crenshaw had made it sound like he was a fast learner. If those threads were suddenly visible to everyone in the world...

Well, either way, it wasn't the world they were in, so he supposed it didn't matter much. "What did they do?" he asked instead.

"Killed a lot of us. Burned as many sections of the Tapestry as they could find. They're not subtle." She sighed. "Even with the scraps that remain, it will be hundreds of years before we could even hope to try again. And in the meantime, we are faced with the prospect of other forces attempting their own ascension, remaking the world in their own ideal image, which may well be as hostile to the Web as the Web is to the Flame."

Martin had heard a thing or two about  _ others,  _ like when Edward-from-America came back cursing about spirals or a woman with skin like sandstone met with Theresa in the dark. He'd never gotten a proper explanation of them, though. "Others like the Lightless Flame, or…?"

Mrs. Crenshaw shuffled the books in her lap. The other unfamiliar book, the one that didn't contain suggestive Spanish poetry, was called  _ A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,  _ which managed to sound even less interesting than Foucault. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth," was all she said to Martin's question, which wasn't really an answer at all. "And some of them, while not weaving a tapestry of their own, have plans that we could still exploit. We've laid low, since the failure of the Infinite Tapestry, biding our time and harrying the most dangerous of our enemies. But the Lightless Flame is hamstrung without Agnes Montague, at least for the time being, and that gives us an opportunity to approach some of our friends. Which, in a roundabout way, is where you come in."

He blinked, and couldn't follow her: it seemed like the ultimate non sequitur, from Heaven and Earth and remaking the world to … him. "What do you need me to do?" he asked, confused.

She held the books out to him and said, "We need a sacrifice."

XXX

(If anyone had actually asked Martin what he wanted out of life, he would've talked in terms of debt and stability and cures. Maybe he would've gotten around, eventually, to things like a degree or a boyfriend or a dog, but those things had always felt like abstractions, the kind of daydream never meant to be in reach.)

(If they had asked him how he meant to serve the Web, he would've requested less hiding the bodies and more reconnaissance, watching without being seen, chatting without being remembered. He liked finding things out and interacting with people without having to be their puppeteer. He liked the freedom that came with being forgotten. Most of all, he liked being useful, liked knowing that he was needed.)

(Martin's life hadn't really been his own since he was nine years old, though.)

XXX

Martin walked into a darkened room. He didn't know who else was there, though he could hear soft breathing. He didn't know  _ what  _ was there, though he could hear the susurrating clicks of joined legs. It probably didn't matter either way. He really hoped it didn't matter.  


(He'd alreadyed signed away the house, the only home he'd ever known. Signed away his mum, to be checked into a care home down in Devon, near the coast.)

He undressed, and tried to leave his clothes in a semblance of a stack. Tried not to feel self conscious as he felt his way towards a low wooden table he could just make out in the center of the room. He lay down, on his back, and kept his hands at his sides as he had been told.

("It's for her own good," he protested, but he knew, didn't he, that there were other reasons why he kept her in that house.) 

Tried not to flinch at the first spider that crawled across his bare leg. As he had been told. 

("I'm afraid that's the way of it," Mr. Stross said. "Feed or be fed upon.")

The first strand of silk didn't feel like anything, nor the second. Each spider was a barely-perceptible tickle on his arms, his legs, his chest, his face. It took time before the webs began to catch and pull, stretching with his breathing, sticking between his fingers. But there were a lot of spiders, and they had plenty of time. 

("It's for the best," he told her, when he made her forget.)

He shut his eyes, and the spiders gradually wove him a blindfold. He wished they could cover his ears, too, and numb his skin, so he didn't have to know what was happening at all. He'd never been good at just tuning thing out, not when his parents fought and not when bullies jeered down the corridor and not when his mother cursed everything from God to the dishes and not now, not here, not this. 

("The Eye will simply  _ love  _ you," Mr. McEvoy said with a little chuckle.)

The webs were gradually getting thick enough that he could no longer feel the spiders themselves crawling on him. But something was happening to the surface of the table: it rippled and shifted and sagged like wood  _ didn't,  _ like it was some live thing that he was laying on and not a piece of furniture. Martin tried to press his hands down into the surface, but his fingers curled around nothing but silk and tiny, skittering bodies. 

("Fear enough for two gods," Mrs. Crenshaw said, "and the love of them both.")

He kicked and thrashed, gripped by a fundamental, atavistic urge to run; he tried to scream, but he could barely open his mouth, could barely suck air through the band of silk that covered it. He could no longer hear anything over the sound of his own pulse in his ears: he could no longer be sure where he was, who was with him. The webs held him fast, above and below, arms and legs and chest. Martin was suspended, helpless, and the Web had him.

( _ Dear Mr. Bouchard, I am writing in regards to the research assistant position that your institute recently posted to Jobs.ac.uk…) _

Eventually he exhausted himself, and the restriction on his air flow left him light-headed. He could no longer hear breathing or movement around him; he could no longer feel any spiders upon him. He swayed, a little, but something about his position limited even that degree of movement. There was nothing he could do to save himself, absolutely nothing; that should've frightened him. He wanted it to frighten him. 

_ (Dear Mr. Blackwood, this is Andrea Grossman with the Magnus Institute's HR department. We received your recent application for the research assistant position, and we'd like to schedule a phone interview…) _

The Spanish book talked about God like a lover, and love like the touch of God. Martin had never been able to imagine love like that when he looked at the wooden statues in his mother's church, or the watercolor pictures of a doe-eyed Jesus in his Sunday school book. But caught like this, held fast in the sticky silk, he could feel something buzzing and thrumming along his skin, low enough to rattle his bones.  _ Love,  _ it felt like.  _ Safe. Ours. _

(Elias Bouchard will smile at him, make pleasant small talk, ask a few distracted questions and seemingly not notice if Martin stutters or fumbles his words. He will not give any sign of what he knows or does not know. He will not give any sign that he enjoys Martin's sweaty palms, his racing heart, his stomach tied in so many knots it might as well be macrame. He will smile blandly, and let the secret feed his god.)

In the still and silent darkness he finally understood what he had been reaching for all this time. The Web was something so much greater than the sum of the people in it, something that bundled him in and embraced him with all its many arms. It offered power, sure, and a chance for control, but that wasn't what it was, really. More than anything else, it was a  _ home,  _ and it could be his _.  _

Martin couldn't reach out to it in return, not now, but he didn't need to. 

(Elias Bouchard traps people, binds them to his heartbeat like fingers on a hand; he will trap Martin Blackwood, and he will not realize that in doing so he has both fulfilled a bargain and accepted a gift.)

Martin surrendered to the love of the Web, and let it bind him.  


XXX

XXX

He wasn't sure how long he remained there in the dark and silence. Long enough to remember. Long enough to understand.

When Martin returned to himself, he was suspended in silk, but it yielded and tore without much effort. He lowered himself to the ground and stretched; for a moment he stretched out all his arms, and the Web was around him and he was the Web.

That moment passed, and he remembered where and when he was: the tunnels, the Institute, more than ten years since he'd first made his choice. He brushed the cobwebs from his clothes and hair and tried to self-assess. He felt physically fine, aside from a desperately dry mouth. He felt like ... himself, mostly. The Web was humming under his skin, behind his teeth, but it no longer felt distracting or overwhelming. Just a comforting background noise, a reminder that he was never, ever alone. He rubbed his eyes — just the two — and he could see the humming threads, still, even in the tunnel's pure darkness. Some were leading him up and out, back towards the archives, which he took as a sign he hadn't completely burned his bridges.  


He wasn't looking forward to explaining all of this to the others, but it was the only way he was going to get any of their trust back, if he ever did. And Jon — Martin's heart tripped, not entirely unpleasantly — Jon would want to know, just for knowing's sake. The Archivist would want to know. Probably they should have that conversation in private, though. 

Martin walked out of the tunnel, leaving the veils of spiral orbs intact behind him. (He almost forgot his torch, though, and had to double back for it.) As he made his way back towards the trap door, he let one hand drag along the wall, feeling for the vibrations in the stone. Feeling for the spiders, the ones that had managed to avoid Melanie's spray campaign. A few of them crept out to meet him, and he imagined these were closer to the Web to begin with, or had been touched by it before. But he could feel every one of them — if he stopped and concentrated, he could sense them in every direction, yards away, maybe further. He wasn't exactly sure what to  _ do  _ with that information, but...maybe he'd find some use for it later. Maybe it was the sort of thing that was just worth knowing for knowing's sake.  

The trap door had a hum of its own, high and quiet, and it was wreathed in threads the others couldn't see — strands of protection and warning, a whole additional layer of security that they'd never noticed until now. Martin hadn't brought his phone with him, so he had no real idea what time it was, whether he was about to step into a dark and empty archive or a fully staffed one, so he took a moment at the top of the steps to clear his head, to tear his focus away from the humming of the Web around him. 

_ I just have to tell the truth. They can't be mad if I tell the truth. They can't be mad if I didn't know the truth to tell it. Jon can ask me. I'll let him.  _

Martin pushed the trap door open and blinked a little at the cold fluorescent light. So. Getting it over with right away, then. He took the last few steps up—

—and something immediately raised gooseflesh all over his arms and neck. The now-familiar hum of the archives was different, wrong: it hissed like a hurt animal, and Martin's stomach dropped. He immediately looked around for the source of the problem, not sure if it was safe to call out or if he should be trying to hide—

Just as the thought crossed his mind, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, among the stacks. "Basira?" he called softly, though it hadn't been the right height or build for her, and the hair too dark to be Melanie. He recognized this person, though, or at least he thought he did. He took a step towards the shelf they had disappeared behind, then another, cautiously.

He turned the corner of the shelf, and now he recognized her — Amita Mahajan, the statement giver from a few...weeks? From a while ago. "Miss Mahajan, hi," he said quickly forcing a smile, as she strode toward him. "Is, er, is everything all—"

Wrong, that was the wrong thing to do, but he didn't realize it until she was already within arm's reach of him. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot, her face ashy and lined, and she wore some kind of cardigan with a strange, asymmetrical red design printed on it. Before Martin could finish his sentence she had grabbed a handful of his hoodie and jerked him forward with more strength than he'd expected out of someone her size.  


Martin opened his mouth to say something, to find out why she was here, to warn her that something was very wrong in the archives and maybe she would like to step outside? But he realized too late that the danger and the desperation radiating through the archives were radiating  _ from her _ —

— and then something hit him in the stomach, hard enough to drive all the air from his lungs. The pain was sharp and deep and instant, and his hands flew up to cover her hand, and the handle of the knife she'd just stuck in him. 

"Stay away from me," she hissed, and wrenched the knife back out.

He was too shocked to stop her; he didn't even have the breath to scream. The pain bent him double, and then dropped him to his knees, blood streaming through his fingers and saturating his clothes and dripping from the chef's knife in her hand. There was a new red splotch on her jumper.

"What," he managed to gasp, thoughts racing as he tried to catch up. "What—?"

"Shut up," she said in a quavering voice, and he could see the tip of the knife jagging this way and that in her shaking hand. "Just shut  _ up  _ and don't ask any  _ questions _ and don't — just stay  _ away."  _

Amita backed quickly away from him, and Martin closed his eyes.


	6. September, 2017

The wound was high on his stomach, right of center — he thought vaguely that he should know enough human anatomy to have an idea what that meant, but then again, he'd never been fond of the meat statements. It was bleeding … rather a lot, actually, hot and wet down his front, and for a minute he just goggled at the sheer _stupidity_ of it all. Weeks of fear and angst and worry over a spooky spider god, only to die at the hands of a disgruntled fashion student—

 _No._ The Web or something in it tugged at him, urging him to get up. _Not now. Not like this._

Martin squeezed his eyes shut and tried to breathe despite the _enormous hole in his stomach._ Skeins. People were skeins, and he remembered the trick of it now, how to pick himself apart so the threads didn't cross. He peeled out the pain and tied it off, sent it to a corner of his head where he didn't have to deal with it right now.

He was still bleeding, and still shaky from the sudden rush of adrenaline, but without the pain in the way he could manage to stand. Amita had left an obvious trail of blood behind her ( _his_ blood, oh, god) but he wasn't sure if following that was the best idea. If she caught him by surprise, she might just stab him again.

If he surprised her, on the other hand…

He listened for the sound of her footsteps, and for any sign of where the others were, assuming she hadn't … assuming they hadn't already got away. He couldn't hear anything immediately around him, but then again, the stacks had a way of muffling noises. Anyway, if they were clever, they'd be hiding in the storage room, or one of the offices, somewhere with a door between them and the disgruntled woman with a knife.

Martin _listened,_ and he recognized the high whine of Jon-in-the-archive, and the discordant growl that meant Melanie. Also a half-dozen house spiders or so, lurking in corners and eating the silverfish, and it suddenly occurred to him how he could use that. Most spider species had crap vision, but every spider web was designed to vibrate, like a drumhead, like an ear —

_"—where we are and wait for the police."_

_"Or we can stop this, now, ourselves."_

_"Are you talking about fighting her? Seriously? She's not_ well."

_"Oh, like you've never wanted to stab Jon."_

_"I am right here!"_

_"Shut up and keep the pressure on."_

The assistants' office, the one he shared with Melanie and Basira. Not an ideal hiding place, but at least it locked from the inside. As long as Melanie didn't come charging out to attack Amita head on, they were probably fine. If Basira had already called the police—

_"Jon? What is it?"_

_"How long has that spider web been there?"_

Martin started making his way towards the office, keeping one hand on the shelf for balance and one hand clamped over the wound. If Amita was looking for the others, she might start checking doors, but she probably couldn't break one down on her own. They just had to stay put until—

_"I swear to god, I am not here to babysit both of you—"_

"Martin!"

The door of the office banged open, and Jon was there, one sleeve of his shirt awash in blood. He had a tape recorder in one hand, because of course he did, and he was looking around wild-eyed as if nobody was trying to stab him. Basira and Melanie were both behind him, though Basira seemed to be trying to drag Jon back into the office, whereas Melanie was trying to get past both of them, resulting in a bit of a scrum.

For a moment, Jon's eyes found Martin. Jon's eyes, and the Eye, they were one and the same and their scrutiny left him a little dizzy. Or maybe that was blood loss.

Then Amita shouted, "You _bastard!"_ And she was running for Jon, she was raising the knife—

 _"Drop it,"_ Martin shouted, spinning the word as best he knew how.

The knife immediately fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. So did Jon's tape recorder, and something heavy and metallic that was probably Melanie's fault. But Martin kept his focus on Amita, who staggered to a halt when she realized she was no longer armed. She turned from Jon to Martin with a mixture of rage and horror. "I knew it," she whispered. "I knew you were one of _them_."

Which, well, she wasn't wrong. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," Martin said as firmly as he could. "But you...really can't just stab people."

"Then make it _stop!"_

The last word was almost a sob, and Martin flinched. Jon, however, took a cautious step forward. "I'm sorry, Miss Mahajan," he said softly. "I would stop it if I could."

She rounded on him again, one fist raised. Out of the corner of his eye, Martin saw Melanie had picked up what appeared to be the entire leg of her desk, a good three feet of stainless steel and exposed screws, and now Jon had given her enough space to charge forward and Basira couldn't watch all of them at once—

"Stop," Martin said, trying his best to focus just on Amita this time. She froze in place, snared by the word, though every muscle in her body seemed to be straining forward against it. Martin approached her on shaking legs, mostly to put himself between her and Melanie. "I'm sorry, okay? But none of us can change what happened. I wish we could help you but we can't."

Big, fat tears were rolling down her face now. "I just want it to go away," she said bitterly.

And that, Martin could help with.

"How long until the police get here?" he asked, looking over his shoulder.

"What are you going to do to her?" Melanie asked sharply. Part of Martin thought irritably that she should just decide who she wanted to beat up and get on with it, but he walled that off the same way he walled off the pain and the dizziness and the growing chill.

Basira, ignoring Melanie's question, said, "I made the call ten minutes ago, but I don't know how long it'll take to scare up a couple of sectioned personnel to respond. Ambulance might be here sooner, but they won't enter without the police if they know there's an armed intruder."

"Three minutes," Jon added, because of course he knew.

Martin put one hand on Amita's shoulder; she flinched. He concentrated on picking apart the skein of her, finding the threads tinged in pain and fear and blood and peeling them away from the rest. He couldn't break those threads, couldn't undo what had been done, but he could wall them off, bury them under a web of _don't think_ and _don't notice_ and _don't acknowledge._ "Leave your jumper here," he told her, weaving it into her mind. "There's a toilet out the door and to your right, wash the blood off your hands there. At the end of that corridor, turn left, and leave through the side entrance. Don't stop anywhere until you get home. Forget...everything. This place, me, Jon, Rowan. Just forget."

For a moment he wasn't sure he was doing it right; he was a decade out of practice, after all. But then Amita mechanically unbuttoned the blood-stained cardigan and let it fall to the floor. She turned and marched out of the archives, eyes a little glassy — but her shirt and trousers were black, so there wouldn't be obvious blood stains, and with any luck the police would drive right past her, if they even saw her at all. Just another Londoner underdressed for the weather. Kids these days.

Martin held his breath until she was out of the archives, and then inhale with a gasp.

"What the hell was that?" Basira asked. He noticed for the first time that she had a wad of bloody cloth wrapped around her hand, too. How many people had gotten stabbed today?

"I made it … go away," Martin said. Now that he'd stopped focusing on it he couldn't seem to stop gasping, panting like he'd just run up a flight of stairs. Maybe he'd overdone it a bit.

"It isn't that simple, Martin," Jon said, but he approached Martin anyway, gripping his arm with one hand and laying the other against his sweaty face. (Why on earth was he sweating? The archives were cold this time of year.) "Where have you been? Are you hurt?"

"Yeah, she got to me a bit," Martin told him. He forced himself to lift his hand away from the wound so he could peel up his hoodie. "I think it's stopped bleeding, though—"

"Jesus _Christ!"_

Jon grabbed Martin's other arm, then, which was a good thing, because Martin's legs just … stopped, the dizziness escaping its bounds and twisting the floor up to his face. Jon barely managed to catch him, and even that wasn't really catching so much as taking some of his weight, turning a collapse into a controlled descent.

(The floor had blood on it, an awful lot of blood, and his trousers were saturated all down one leg.)

(Maybe he should've been playing closer attention.)

Light-headed though he was, Martin could feel the Web all around him, holding him close. The archives might still be jangling with fear and anger, but at least he was home. "Hey," Martin said, reaching for Jon even though his hands had gone all pins and needles. He couldn't pass out just yet; he had to tell the truth. "Jon. Look at me."

Jon had been sniping at Basira, words too fast to keep up with, but he turned back to Martin like a compass seeking north. "What?"

 _"Look_ at me."

Jon looked. The Archivist looked, eyes shining a little brighter than they should, like a cat's. His face barely changed, but somehow Martin could see the Beholding behind it, in all its voracious hunger. For stories. For secrets. For everything that no one was supposed to know.

And the Web had secrets enough to feed it for a long, long time. Secrets and gifts and offerings, and all it wanted, all Martin wanted in that single shivering moment, was to know the Eye would never look away.

Whatever Jon saw in Martin, it rocked him back slightly. "Oh," he said, blinking twice, and wrapped his bloody hand firmly around Martin's. _"Oh."_

Then Basira waved a hand through the space between. "Can we focus...?"

Martin let the conversation slide away from him again, relaxing into the feeling of Jon's hand and the love of his gods, up until the ambulance crew came to fetch him.

XXX

He didn't remember most of the ambulance ride, and the A&E was spotty. There were a lot of questions, most of which Jon answered for him with the Archivist's precision. He remembered being told that he needed surgery, and consenting to that, but not much else.

(In his dreams he saw the Web in the Eye and the Eye in the Web, recursive and infinite, and he felt like he finally understood it.)

He flirted with consciousness a few times in the recovery ward, surfacing long enough for a sentence or an image to register before going under again, so he wasn't totally disorientated when the anesthesia wore off for good. He recognized a hospital, at least, and all the smells and sounds he'd known since childhood, weirdly comforting in their familiarity.

More comforting was the soft voice coming from somewhere off to his left. "'Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind, where branchéd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, instead of pines shall murmur in the wind…'"

It turned out laughing was a terrible idea when you'd recently been stabbed. The pain was down to a dull, diffuse ache, but Martin's hand still flew to the spot, nearly disrupting the pulse oximeter on his finger. Jon nearly dropped his book in his haste to lean forward. "Are you reading poetry?" Martin asked him giddily.

Jon cleared his throat. "It's...a thing you do in hospitals, as I understand it. Reading, that is."

"You're reading _Keats,_ though," Martin pointed out.

"You _like_ Keats," Jon protested.

 _"You_ don't," Martin said. "And besides, I'm not in a coma."

"It's not as if there's a rule—" Jon sighed, and put the book away. "I refuse to argue about this."

Jon had put on a clean shirt, and a strip of white gauze peeped out from under one of his rolled-up sleeves; there was still dried blood under his fingernails. The euphoric haze of the painkillers parted a bit as Martin remembered what had happened. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Hmm? Oh yes." He glanced down at his arm. "It wasn't really that deep. Ten stitches. Basira had it worse, though, she actually grabbed the damn thing—" He cut himself off, pressing his lips together in a hard line.

Martin traced the outline of his own bandages through his gown: one for the wound and one for the surgical incision, and a drain trailing out towards a plastic bulb at the end of the bed. "I'm sorry," Martin said, in reference to a lot of different things.

"You were down there for three days," Jon said quietly. "Very biblical. And that was after hiding from me for the better part of a week."

"I wasn't hiding," Martin protested.

"I couldn't find you." Jon's words were bitten off, clipped. "Martin, I couldn't _see_ you when you didn't want to be seen. It was … disconcerting."

Oh. He hadn't been aware that was something he could do, though in retrospect, it did explain the general tenor of the text messages. "I told you on the tape, I needed to work some things out on my own," Martin said. "And … I did, I guess. Just picked the wrong time to come out."

"Or the right one, I suppose," Jon said, slumping back in his chair a bit. "I'm not sure what Melanie may have told the police, but Basira and I both left Miss Mahajan's name and details out of our version of events. Not that this is over for her, but…"

But no one was getting arrested for grievous bodily harm, and Melanie hadn't attacked anyone with a desk leg. Small victories. A partial fix for a problem they'd largely caused themselves.

For a little while they were both quiet, and Martin dozed a bit without really reaching sleep. When Jon spoke again, it was quiet and distant, almost like he was talking to himself. "My first Leitner was from the Web."

Martin dragged his eyes open; Jon was leaned forward, elbows on knees, toying with the poetry book without opening it. "Yeah?" he asked, not sure where Jon was going with this.

"I was eight," Jon added.

"...Oh, god."

"It was a formative experience," he continued, which Martin guessed was the understatement of the century. "And I've wondered sometimes, over the past few months, whether I still carried some sort of mark on me as a result of that. If it was ever going to come back and finish the job."

Webs within webs. _If she wanted to suborn the Archivist…_  "I don't … I don't think that's what it wants to do," Martin said, as carefully as he could. "At least, not anymore?"

Jon gave a small, helpless laugh. "No. No, that's not the impression I got, either." He didn't say what impression he _had_ got, though, if he'd felt the same things was Martin in that moment in the archives, or if it had all been a delusion borne of blood loss.  Instead he raked his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing up comically on one side. "Christ, I chose a terrible time to quit smoking."

They were interrupted by a nurse, then, who needed to take Martin's vitals and ask him who the Prime Minister was and all that. "Your boyfriend's been a proper pain in the ass," she added while she did something disgusting with the drain. "You're lucky to have him."

Martin needed a minute to process that comment, and by the time he said, "He's not my boyfriend," the nurse had given him another shot of pain medicine. As the world blurred around the edges again, he realized Jon had stepped out. He didn't come back in.

XXX

The police stopped by to question him, and Martin didn't have to lie, not really. "I've been signed off work for the past week, so I don't know what's been going on, exactly. That woman was already there when I came in, and, well, you can see how she greeted me…"

He didn't have to spin anything into the words. Not really. They already wanted nothing to do with the institute, with any of its weirdness, and were looking to make the case go away. He maybe just … encouraged that a little.

The trauma surgeon also stopped by to talk with him, to explain his treatment and prognosis, but she seemed unaccountably nervous when she started talking about the surgery itself. "The knife went straight through your liver and punctured the inferior vena cava," she said. "You lost a lot of blood very quickly. Did … did your co-workers do any sort of first aid?"

"I don't really remember?" Martin said, unsure of what she was getting at. "I was, er, pretty woozy."

"No bandaging, or packing of the wound?" she prompted. Martin shook his head. "Because … during the surgery we found multiple masses of, erm, fibrous foreign material. It looked like surgical packing, to be honest, but it shouldn't have been possible … I mean, the entry wound was wide, but not _that_ wide. And the bit I had tested in the lab came back as … proteinaceous."

Even with a lot of painkillers in his system, Martin could put together _fibrous_ and _protein_ _._ "Sorry," he told the surgeon. "Is that bad?"

She stared at him for a minute like she knew he was hiding something, but he kept a straight face and she looked away first. "It's probably nothing significant," she murmured.

When he looked at his chart a later there were some lines about _teratomas_ but no recommendation for further follow-up. Which, well, better that than _patient's guts are full of cobwebs_ being officially logged somewhere by the NHS _._ He just hoped it didn't bother her or her colleagues enough that they decided to come make a statement about it; he suspected Jon wouldn't take it well.

XXX

He spent ten days in the hospital altogether, and by the end there were more spiders on his ward than the rest of the building combined. He thought vaguely about apologizing for that, but he couldn't think of a way to do it that wouldn't get him referred to the psychiatric department. Besides, he appreciated the company, since after that first day's conversation with Jon, he didn't get a lot of humanoid visitors.

Oh, some of the other Institute staff sent him a get-well card — he suspected Rosie was the instigator, and a lot of the notes inside looked perfunctory, but the thought counted. Peter Lukas sent a massive bouquet of yellow roses and a card that said _My Deepest Sympathies._ Martin supposed he should be grateful he didn't visit in person.

Basira, surprisingly, came to visit once, just long enough to deliver a few things that she'd clearly liberated from Martin's flat so Jon didn't have to. "It's disgusting in there, by the way," she said, offering him a bag with her unbandaged left hand. "If that kind of thing still bothers you."

"Thanks?" Martin said, taking it.. "I wasn't exactly expecting company, you know."

She sighed. "I'm just making an observation. You seemed pretty certain on your tape that you weren't coming out the same person who went down there, wherever you were, and then seeing you in action…"

"I...yeah, I suppose that wasn't exactly…" Trustworthy? Reassuring? Human? He found his phone in the bag and toyed with it until he realized the battery was dead. "I actually don't … feel that different, though? If that helps?"

"I felt it," she said flatly. "When you made her drop the knife. We all did. That's pretty damn different."

"I was trying to help," he protested, but she just raised an eyebrow at him. He looked away first. "Guess I don't know my own strength."

"Yeah. And you know what they say about the road to hell."

This wasn't a conversation he actually wanted to have, but Basira didn't leave. He spent a few minutes unwinding his phone charger until a change of subject occurred to him. "Could you — I don't want to impose, but — is there anything I could do, you know, work wise, from here?"

She raised an eyebrow at that. "Getting itchy, are you?"

He shrugged. "Sort of? But also just … bored. I mean, I'm allowed to stand up again, that's been nice, but…"

"I'll pass it along," she said. "Maybe it'll get Jon out of the office before Melanie strangles him."

But she didn't come back, and nobody sent any statements or paperwork, and by the time all the doctors had signed off on his paperwork (a remarkable recovery, the surgeon said, looking uneasy) Martin could tell that he'd been away from the archives for too long. It wasn't really an itch: more like a pull, ten year's worth of threads twisted into a lead that tugged inexorably at the edge of his thoughts. It wasn't _bad_ yet, not the way Tim had once described it, but then again Martin wasn't sure he could unravel the malignant threads that bound each of them to Elias from the ones that tied him in a dozen other ways to the Institute, to the archives, to Jon. 

So it was a relief and a pleasant surprise all in one to find Jon lurking outside the hospital, when he was finally discharged. Jon's shoulders were hunched up awkwardly, and he had almost definitely been smoking, going by the smell, even if there wasn't a cigarette butt in sight. "Hello," he said with a terrible forced brightness, as if they had just run into one another by happenstance in a shop or on a bus.

They'd insisted on rolling him out in a wheelchair; Martin levered himself upright, still moving cautiously even though he'd been allowed up and around for a whole week by this point. "Hi," he said, and was then utterly lost for what to say next, on an open street and in front of orderly with the wheelchair. "Um. I thought you said you were quitting again?"

"Melanie and Basira requested that I keep it up, actually," Jon said, sounding more like himself when he frowned. "Apparently they feel I've been handling it … poorly."

That sounded about right, not that Martin would ever, ever say it. "Were you coming to visit, or…?"

"I thought I'd … that is, if it's not an imposition … I could see you home?"

Martin's heart tripped in his chest. "You do know there are a lot of—"

"Spiders, yes," Jon said, but his grimace was a fleeting thing. "That seems to be something I'm going to have to get used to eventually, isn't it?"

It wasn't the sort of thing that should've made Martin smile. It did anyway.

They took a cab, rather than testing his uncertain stamina on a bus or the Tube. It should've been awkward, given how little they'd seen of one another, how little of importance they'd actually discussed. Martin could usually count on himself to find a way to make it awkward. But just being near Jon again felt like something inside coming into alignment, the way iron filings were supposed to align to a magnetic field. He wasn't sure if the feeling was more his or more the Web's or some combination of the two acting in harmony; he found the uncertainty didn't bother him anymore.

Jon seemed to feel much the same. Or perhaps he didn't want to discuss eldritch spider gods in front of the cabbie. Either way, Martin kept his mouth shut and enjoyed it.

Climbing the stairs to his flat took a lot longer than usual, and woke the dull ache in his abdomen that medication had been keeping at bay. "All right?" Jon asked at one point, when Martin paused on the landing, and one hand fluttered up to his shoulder.

"Yeah, yeah. Just need to get my strength back," Martin assured him.

But of course, he realized a moment too late, the last time he'd been this out of breath and assuring Jon he was fine was the moment before he collapsed from blood loss. Jon didn't say anything about it, but he touched Martin, very lightly, on the arm, and watched him closely as they made it up the last turn of the stairs.

The spiders had been busy. He could feel the location of each and every one, even before he opened the door, and inside he found the cobwebs had spread down from the ceiling corners to cling to the furniture and windows. "Oh, come on, guys," he groaned, switching on the light.

Jon made a choked-off noise that was probably a laugh? Martin hoped it was a laugh. "Roommates make a mess of things while you were out?"

"I should probably just give up and buy them crickets," Martin said, brushing down the couch so they could sit without getting covered in web.

"Hmm." Jon gave the cushions a thorough examination before he gingerly sat down. "Feed that which feeds you."

So they were talking about it. Martin took a minute to catch his breath. "I remember everything now," he explained. "It wasn't … I'm not a double agent or anything. Just an offering to the Beholding."

"An offering," Jon repeated, brows furrowed. "What, some sort of hostage exchange—?"

"Not like that," Martin insisted. "The Web wanted to make an alliance with the Eye, so it could take advantage of the Watcher's Crown. And since the Eye likes uncovering secrets, I was … literally, made for it."

"An alliance," Jon echoed, and then he huffed. "Well, I suppose that's one thing to call it."

"What would you call it, then?" Martin asked warily.

Jon averted his gaze. "Courtship, maybe?" he offered uneasily. "If that even applies to … things of that nature."

"They want things," Martin pointed out. "They … plenty of the avatars feel loved," because he wasn't sure how Jon actually felt about the Eye, even now. "I … guess that means they could … with each other? Somehow?"

"And the resulting mental images are going to haunt my nightmares," Jon muttered.

Martin thought about the figure he saw in his dreams, the Web inside the Eye, and suddenly wondered if Jon had been seeing the same thing or something else entirely. If he really had felt the same moment of communion, or if it had all been a blood-loss-based delusion. "Anyway.  Elias didn't know," he continued awkwardly. "At least, I don't think so. But with him in prison, I don't — I mean, I assume that was why they waited until now to let me remember things. I don't have to hide anymore."

Jon nodded absently, but he was frowning. "And now they're both pulling our respective strings, trying to … to act out this 'alliance' through their avatars…"

Was that what he thought? Worse, was that how he _felt?_ "I've fancied you for years," Martin blurted, heart in his throat. "Since before you were even the Archivist. It's not, this isn't just the Web, for me."

Jon flushed a bit as well, and now he seemed to be searching the room, looking anywhere but Martin. "I … that is, I've overheard … I assumed it was just office gossip, really."

"Well," Martin said, face burning, "It's not."

Jon looked down at his own hands for a few long moments, flexing fingers against his legs; Martin was excruciatingly aware of his own hands, of the exact distance between Jon's knee and his thigh, of every single spider in the flat beginning to stir in reaction to his straining nerves. He willed them to calm down before Jon noticed the sound of skittering little legs, because that was about the only way this could somehow get _worse_.

Finally, Jon exhaled, long and slow, and shut his eyes. "You're a remarkable man, Martin. It took me far too long to realize that. And when I'm around you, lately … it's easier. This, whatever I'm becoming, is easier. I … I feel whole."

Which … wasn't exactly what Martin wanted to hear, but it was better than being jerked around on a string. It was enough to give him the courage to lay a hand on Jon's, and his heart leapt when Jon laced their fingers together and squeezed gently.

"I don't know if it's entirely healthy or safe for either of us," Jon continued. "I don't … I'm not exactly good with relationships."

"Really, I never would've guessed," Martin said, and succeeded in getting Jon to crack a small smile.

"Work-life balance has never been my strong suit," Jon clarified. "And … I'm asexual, which tends to be something of a non-starter for most people."

The way he stated that, like it was a simple fact, made Martin retroactively angry at everyone Jon had ever dated before. "Not for me," he said firmly. "Not if it's you."

Now it was Jon's turn to get red in the face, though he didn't look away. "What do you want, Martin?" he asked quietly.

It wasn't a compulsion, or at least, wasn't an intentional one, but Martin didn't think he could've dissembled even if he'd wanted to. "You. I want to take care of you. To keep you safe, even though I don't think you'll let me. I want to be a home for you, for as long as you'll have me, whatever you want that to mean. If you don't — if you're not actually interested, or if all this is too weird —" He shrugged, words failing him. "I'll just, you know. Carry on as I have been."

Jon's eyes had gone huge, and when he said, _"Martin,"_ there was some inexpressible tenderness in his voice that made Martin's heart soar. He was very careful, when he leaned in to kiss him, even more careful than the half-healed wounds on his stomach required. Martin hardly dared to move, hardly dared to breath, except to press his mouth to Jon's in return.

Jon broke the kiss, but kept their foreheads pressed together. "Never stop surprising me," he said, a bit breathless and a bit pleading.

Martin dared to curl a hand around the back of Jon's neck, running his thumb through the short hair above his collar. "What do you want?" he asked, even if he thought (hoped) he already knew the answer.

Jon, on the other hand, had to stop and think for a minute, pulling back slightly with an almost startled expression. "You," he finally said, and put a hand in the center of Martin's chest, over his heart. "Just...just you."

And they stayed on the couch together, making out like teenagers, until Jon's phone rang and made both of them jump. "Oh, god damn it," Jon muttered, patting down his pockets for it.

It was just the default iPhone ringtone, but something about it sounded hollow to Martin, more like an echo than a sound itself. "Peter?" he guessed.

"Of course it is." Jon showed no particular concern about rejecting the call. "He just wants to ask about you, and I can do without him smirking at me for a bit longer."

"He's still technically our boss," Martin pointed out, even if he agreed with the sentiment.

"Which is why I should probably get back to work." He sat back and ran a hand through his hair, as if that would make it look any less ruffled. "You're still signed off until Monday, aren't you?"

Martin nodded. "Though — it's my turn on the rota, isn't it? For recording?"

"If there was ever an excuse to skip a week," Jon started to say, but then he looked at Martin, and then he _looked_ with that more-than-human insight. "All right. I'll bring something by tomorrow, and I know you've got a recorder here."

"I'll try to clean up a bit by then," Martin promised. "And, erm … maybe dinner before?"

"Dinner and a statement." Jon's mouth twitched up. "How romantic."

"You were the one who read me Keats," Martin told him, and they kissed again before Jon left.

XXX

HMP Belmarsh only allowed visitors to the high-security unit on certain days of the week. Jon was on the approved list; Martin was not. They went together anyway, on a gray day at the end of October, and Martin dared to hold Jon's hand on the train. Jon smiled wanly. He wasn't certain who was reassuring who.

("It's the next one, according to Gerard Keay," Jon had explained. "And perhaps the last one, from what I've found in Gertrude's notes.")

There were only a few people gathered in the waiting area for the 9:30 visiting period. A prison officer explained in a droning monotone what they could and could not bring into the visiting areas, and Jon dutifully took off his watch and put his shoulder bag in a locker. Martin hadn't brought a bag, and he didn't wear a watch; he hung back instead, hands in his pockets, and studied the guards, unraveling each of them in turn.

("Why should we trust you?" Melanie had demanded. "Either of you? It's the whole reason he's even here—")

There were two queues at the door, where guards checked each visitor's identification and patted them down for contraband. Martin and Jon positioned themselves at the end of one of them, and Jon showed his passport and submitted himself to be searched.

"Name?" the guard asked when Martin stepped up.

"Martin Blackwood."

He flipped back to the first page of his list, and then frowned. "You're not booked for today."

"I know," he said, fighting to keep his voice level.

The guard opened his mouth and then … froze, just for a moment. Hesitated, while Martin silently tugged on his strings.

("Seriously?" Basira had asked flatly. "You're taking your plans from _Star Wars?"_

Martin had cringed. "At least it's one of the good ones?")

"Go on through," the guard said, attention already falling back on his list, and Martin held his breath until he'd gotten past the pat-down.

They were led to a private meeting room, where Elias had already been handcuffed to a sturdy table. He wore the garish yellow-and-green boiler suit of a high-risk prisoner, but he looked just as at home as he would've in a shirt and tie back at the institute. "I must say, Jon, you've rather hurt my feelings," he started to say as they entered. "I was expecting—"

And then he froze, as Martin came into his line of sight.

("You know how he hates surprises," Peter had said, though it felt like a lifetime ago.)

"Expecting what, Elias?" Jon asked with vicious brightness as he sat down. "You know it's rude not to finish your sentences."

There were two guards on duty, but the only thing that had Martin's attention for a moment was the high whine of the Beholding, like a television on mute. He was used to feeling it from Jon by now, sometimes nearly imperceptible and sometimes barely contained by his skin. It was different with Elias: steadier, but somehow muted. Maybe because he had better control over himself, or maybe because, away from the Institute, it was harder to feed that which fed him.

Or maybe, as of late, Elias just hadn't been getting fed enough.

"That does make a few things abundantly clearer," Elias finally said. "I see Mr. Spider's finally caught up to you after all."

("It doesn't matter what I promise if you don't believe me," Martin had said, but he'd promised anyway, all of them, and Jon at least had said, "I trust you.")

"It's more than that, Elias," Jon said. "Haven't you felt a bit lonely lately? Or did you just chalk that up to Peter Lukas getting a bit too cozy in the institute?"

"I knew something was interfering with my line of sight, but once again, I seem to have misjudged Martin." He smiled, thin and mean. "There won't be a third time."

"No," Martin agreed. There was only one chair on the visitor's side of the table, so he stood behind Jon and put a hand on his shoulder. "There won't."

He felt something, for a moment, that was probably Elias trying to dig into his mind again. Trying to find something else he could use to hurt him. But Martin was safe in the Web's embrace, now, and he'd taken the time to weave himself some protection. Elias was left scrabbling fruitlessly at the edges of him, powerless. At least for now.

("The statements won't be enough, you know," Jon had said, before Basira or Melanie had to. And Martin had said, "I know," and then he had started to plan.)

"We have questions," Jon said, interrupting Elias's digging. "And for once, I think you'll answer them properly."

Elias raised his chin. "Or what? You'll compel me? Shall we really do this dance again—"

"I don't have to do anything to you," Jon interrupted. "Martin, on the other hand..."

The guards looked at one another uneasily, but Martin was still Martin, soft around the edges and wearing a faded jumper that rode up above his wrists. He didn't look like he could make anyone do anything, and he could spin their doubt into passivity without saying a word. And Elias, he obviously knew their attention was wavering, going into soft focus behind a layer of cobweb.

And Elias, somewhere hidden deep in the skein of himself, began to be afraid.

Martin smiled.

("The Web works at cross purposes to itself all the time," Martin had explained, desperate to be believed. "No one can see the whole pattern, the whole plan, not even from the inside. So ... what if there isn't one? What if the left hand really doesn't know what the other seven are doing?"

"You'd be staking a lot on an _if,"_ Basira had pointed out.

Jon had sighed. "No. We're staking a lot on you two being able to stop us.")

"What is it you want to know?" Elias asked, glancing warily between the two of them.

Jon leaned forward slightly in his seat, but not far enough to lose contact with Martin's hand. His eyes were over-bright and merciless. "Tell me about the Watcher's Crown."

 


End file.
